Find and replace filename recursively in a directory

I want to rename all the files in a folder which starts with 123_xxx.txt to xxx.txt.

For example, my directory has:

123_xxx.txt
123_yyy.txt
123_zzz.txt

I want to rename all files as:

xxx.txt
yyy.txt
zzz.txt

I have seen some useful bash scripts in this forum but I'm still confused how to use it for my requirement.

Let us suppose I use:

for file in `find -name '123_*.txt'` ; do mv $file {?.txt} ; done

Is this the correct way to do it?

Solution 1:

You can do it this way:

find . -name '123_*.txt' -type f -exec sh -c '
for f; do
    mv "$f" "${f%/*}/${f##*/123_}"
done' sh {} +

No pipes, no reads, no chance of breaking on malformed filenames, no non-standard tools or features.

Solution 2:

find . -name "123*.txt" -exec rename 's/^123_//' {} ";" 

will do it. No AWK, no for, no xargs needed, but rename, a very useful command from the Perl lib. It is not always included with Linux, but is easy to install from the repos.

Solution 3:

In case you want to replace string in file name called foo to bar you can use this in linux ubuntu, change file type for your needs

find -name "*foo*.filetype" -exec rename 's/foo/bar/' {} ";"