Renaming files using find

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2004-08-31 11:15, Gerard Samuel <fbsd-questions at trini0.org> wrote:
>
> Im trying to rename a few files with the .dist extension.
> Im trying ->
> hivemind# find . -name '*.dist' -exec cp {} `basename {} .dist` \;
>
> And Im getting ->
> cp: ./html.php.dist and ./html.php.dist are identical (not copied).
> cp: ./horde.php.dist and ./horde.php.dist are identical (not copied).
> cp: ./motd.php.dist and ./motd.php.dist are identical (not copied).
> cp: ./mime_mapping.php.dist and ./mime_mapping.php.dist are identical (not copied).
> cp: ./prefs.php.dist and ./prefs.php.dist are identical (not copied).
> cp: ./registry.php.dist and ./registry.php.dist are identical (not copied).
> cp: ./lang.php.dist and ./lang.php.dist are identical (not copied).
> cp: ./mime_drivers.php.dist and ./mime_drivers.php.dist are identical (not copied).
>
> What is wrong with the command that I issued.

The basename command gets expanded by the shell you use *BEFORE* find
has a change to run.

You can try playing tricks with escaping the backquotes, which is
probably going to result very quickly in ugliness like \\\`foo\\\` or
you can use find to "generate" a list of filenames which will be
"processed" by the rest of the command-line to spit out the rename
commands, and feed them to sh(1) for execution, i.e.:

    $ ls -l
    total 0
    -rw-rw-r--  1 keramida  wheel  - 0 Aug 31 18:33 koko.dist
    -rw-rw-r--  1 keramida  wheel  - 0 Aug 31 18:33 lala.dist

    $ find . -name \*.dist | \
      awk '{ printf "mv \"%s\" `basename \"%s\" .dist`\n",$0,$0; }'

    mv "./lala.dist" `basename "./lala.dist" .dist`
    mv "./koko.dist" `basename "./koko.dist" .dist`

    $ find . -name \*.dist | \
      awk '{ printf "mv \"%s\" `basename \"%s\" .dist`\n",$0,$0; }' | sh

    $ ls -l
    total 0
    -rw-rw-r--  1 keramida  wheel  - 0 Aug 31 18:33 koko
    -rw-rw-r--  1 keramida  wheel  - 0 Aug 31 18:33 lala