Micha Feigin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I am trying to do a batch rename for a bunch of files with spaces in the > name (in order to remove the spaces actually). I tried to use bash's for > .. in command but it splits up the lines on spaces and not on line ends. > Any ideas? > > The files are named "Copy of ..." and I want to drop the Copy of part. > I tried to do > for file in `ls -1`; do > cp $file `echo -n "$file" | sed 's/Copy of \(.*\)/\1/'` > done
You pretty much never want to do `ls` in a shell script; * has the same effect, saves a process, and is somewhat more predictable in terms of filename-to-shell-word mapping. You also need to be careful about quoting $file when you use it. Thus, I'd try something like for file in *; do cp "$file" `echo "$file" | sed 's/^Copy of//'` done I think you get no guarantees if $file is "Copy of my file.doc", though; you might need something like for file in *; do newfile=`echo "$file" | sed 's/^Copy of//'` cp "$file" "$newfile" done to make sure that you really do only have a single word. (And I'm still not sure I have this right. :-) -- David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/ "Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal." -- Abra Mitchell -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
