adding command line option -r

Question

I want to add a command line option -r, recurse, to this code:

for name in *.$1; do
    stripped_name="$(basename "$name" ".$1")"
    mv "$name.$1" "$name.$2"
done

So if I enter "change -r txt doc", the command should be executed recursively on any subfolder. For example, if there is a file aaa.txt and a directory y containing files y/bbb.txt and y/ccc.txt....it should result in files aaa.doc, y/bbb.doc and y/ccc.doc.

Also if I don't supply the "-r", it should work as normal.

Does anyone know how to add this to my script?

Mark Longair · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-31 11:41:06Z

1

I bet this is far from ideal, but how about the following? This uses find to get the files to rename, but if you don't supply the -r, it adds -maxdepth 1 to the arguments. Then it uses the rename(1) command on Debian based systems (e.g. Ubuntu) to rename the matching files. The -print0 and xargs -0 makes sure that this doesn't have problems with odd filenames that might contain newlines, etc.

#!/bin/bash

if [ x"$1" = x-r ]
then
    FIND_OPTIONS=""
    shift
else
    FIND_OPTIONS="-maxdepth 1"
fi

FROM="$1"
TO="$2"

find . $FIND_OPTIONS -name '*.'$FROM -print0 | xargs -0 rename "s/\.$FROM/\.$TO/"

answered Mar 31, 2011 at 11:41

Mark Longair

472k77 gold badges427 silver badges330 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

2 Comments

Mr Teeth Over a year ago

I was thinking maybe using a "case" to select -r. I'm thinking about writing it that way. What do you think? BTW, thanks for the suggestion and code Mark.

Mark Longair Over a year ago

I don't think there's any need to use case here - the -r is either present or not, rather than being one of a several possibilities.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

adding command line option -r

1 Answer 1

2 Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

2 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related