[CLUE-Tech] removing spaces from filenames?

[Timothy C. Klein]

* Dave Price (davep at kinaole.org) wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a _bunch_ of files that were created on a windoze system with
> embedded spaces in their names.  Can anyone recommend a technique to
> programmatically rename the files - replacing ' ' with '_' on both the
> file and dir names?
> 
> I am thinking perl, but I am not sure what sysntax I would need to use
> to search and rename.
> 
> TIA

I keep the following little script around to rename stuff.  Could
probably be done in one line, but I was learning perl when I first wrote
it, so I did it fully bloated.

Just change the variables $glob_pat, $out_pat, and $replace_pat at the
top to make it do different stuff.  I changed it for space-to-underscore
conversion, but I haven't tried it.  You probably want to test it on
some temp stuff before you risk erasing a bunch of files :-)

Tim

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

# Change these to set up the desired replacement
my $glob_pat = "*";
my $out_pat = " ";
my $replace_pat = "_";

foreach my $file (glob "$glob_pat") {
	my $newfile = $file;
$newfile =~ s/$out_pat/$replace_pat/;
	if (-e $newfile) {
		warn "Can't rename $file to $newfile: $newfile exists.\n";
	} elsif (rename $file, $newfile) {
		## Sucess, the work is already done.
	} else {
		warn "Rename of $file to $newfile failed: $!\n";
	}
}


--
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== Timothy Klein || teece at silverklein.net   ==
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== "Hello, World" 17 Errors, 31 Warnings... ==
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