Rename files and directories recursively under ubuntu /bash

A solution using find:

To rename files only:

find /your/target/path/ -type f -exec rename 's/special/regular/' '{}' \;

To rename directories only:

find /your/target/path/ -type d -execdir rename 's/special/regular/' '{}' \+

To rename both files and directories:

find /your/target/path/ -execdir rename 's/special/regular/' '{}' \+

If you don't mind installing another tool, then you can use rnm:

rnm -rs '/special/regular/g' -dp -1 *

It will go through all directories/sub-directories (because of -dp -1) and replace special with regular in their names.

@speakr's answer was the clue for me.

If using -execdir to transform both files and directories, you'll also want to remove -type f from the example shown. To spell it out, use:

find /your/target/path/ -execdir rename 's/special/regular/' '{}' \+

Also, consider adding g (global) flag to the regex if you want to replace all occurrences of special with regular in a given filename and not just the first occurrence. For example:

find /your/target/path/ -execdir rename 's/special/regular/g' '{}' \+

will transform special-special.jpg to regular-regular.jpg. Without the global flag, you'll end up with regular-special.jpg.

FYI: GNU Rename is not installed by default on Mac OSX. If you are using the Homebrew package manager, brew install rename will remedy this.

For those just wanting to rename directories you can use this command:

find /your/target/path/ -type d -execdir rename 's/special/regular/' '{}' \;

Note type is now d for directory, and using -execdir.

I haven't been able to work out how to rename both files and directories in a single pass though.

Someone commented earlier that once it renamed the root folder then it couldn't traverse the file tree any more. There is a -d switch available that does a depth traversal from the bottom-up, so the root would be renamed last I believe:

find -d /your/target/path/ -type d -execdir rename 's/special/regular/' '{}' \;

From the manpage (man find):

 -d      Cause find to perform a depth-first traversal, i.e., directories are visited in post-order and all entries in a directory will be
         acted on before the directory itself.  By default, find visits directories in pre-order, i.e., before their contents.  Note, the
         default is not a breadth-first traversal.

Here is another approach which is more portable and does not rely on the rename command (since it may require different parameters depending on the distros).

It renames files and directories recursively:

find . -depth -name "*special*" | \
while IFS= read -r ent; do mv $ent ${ent%special*}regular${ent##*special}; done

What it does

• use find with -depth parameter to reorder the results by performing a depth-first traversal (i.e. all entries in a directory are displayed before the directory itself).
• do pattern substitutions to only modifiy the last occurence of regular in the path.

That way the files are modified first and then each parent directory.

Example

Giving the following tree:

├── aa-special-aa
│   └── bb-special
│       ├── special-cc
│       ├── special-dd
│       └── Special-ee
└── special-00

It generate those mv commands in that particular order:

mv ./aa-special-aa/bb-special/special-cc ./aa-special-aa/bb-special/regular-cc
mv ./aa-special-aa/bb-special/special-dd ./aa-special-aa/bb-special/regular-dd
mv ./aa-special-aa/bb-special ./aa-special-aa/bb-regular
mv ./aa-special-aa ./aa-regular-aa
mv ./special-00 ./regular-00

To obtain the following tree:

├── aa-regular-aa
│   └── bb-regular
│       ├── regular-cc
│       ├── regular-dd
│       └── Special-ee
└── regular-00

For rename version rename from util-linux 2.23.2 the following command worked for me:

find . -type f -exec rename mariadb mariadb-proxy '{}' \;