How to change suffix of the files

Question

In a directory structure which has multiple subfolders and files in it, some of the file names have the suffix _create (e.g. java1_create) and some of them with _bak (java2_bak).

I need to rename only the files with suffix _create as _bak, so that all the files should have the _bak suffix.

Is there any command or script to do this?

Answer 1

On Linux, assuming that none of your file names have _create inside them (only at the end), you can use the rename utility from the util-linux package, which is installed on all non-embedded Linux systems. Call find to execute the command on all files in subdirectories recursively.

find -depth -exec rename _create _bak {} +

On Debian and derived distributions (Ubuntu, Mint, …) that ship a Perl script as rename, either call rename.ul instead of rename, or replace rename _create _bak by rename 's/_create$/_bak/'.

Answer 2

This may be what you're after:

for file in $(find . -name "*_create"); do mv -i $file ${file%%_create}_bak; done

Be sure to test it before using it on real files.

Answer 3

On Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives, with the Perl rename, sometimes installed as prename:

#enable ** globbing
shopt -s globstar 
#use the rename utility
rename -n 's/_create$/_bak/' **_create 

Remove the -n (= --no-act) flag if it works as expected.

---

Note:

This is probably the shortest efficient way to do this, especially if you've got shotp -s globstar already on (I have it in my ~/.bashrc).

However, you could get:

-bash: /usr/bin/rename: Argument list too long

if the **_create expansion is over getconf ARG_MAX characters long (2097152 on my Linux box).

If that is case, you'll need to use find -print0 with xargs -0 (see lcd047's answer).