HowTo: Rename multiple files recursively

This blog entry is related to old post here. The only difference is that this time around it would be done recursively.

If you have hundreds of files with a common filename located from direcoty and its subdirectories, and you wish to have their filenames renamed to fielname with all uppercase letters - this blog can provide the concept on how to achieve that. And if you wish to remove space character from those hundreds of filename recursively, this blog entry can spark the idea on how to do that as well.

Supposed we want to rename all *.mp3 files with lowercase characters to *.mp3, you will the concept below on how to do this.

Sample scenario #1

# cd /tmp
# find /tmp/songs *.mp3 -type f
output:
/tmp/songs/filefile1.mp3
/tmp/songs/dir1/file2.mp3
/tmp/songs/dir1/dir5/file3.mp3
/tmp/songs/dir2/dir3/dir4/file6.mp3
/tmp/songs/dir2/dir3/file5.mp3
/tmp/songs/dir2/file4.mp3
/tmp/songs/file1.mp3
file1.mp3
filefile1.mp3

An overview of these MP3 files in tree view



The next step is to rename all these *.mp3 file collections into its uppercase form filenames and do it recursively. This can be done using combinations of linux command done in loop concept.

From this blog entry, we would be renaming their *.mp3 filenames into a filename with all uppercase letters. There are hundreds of ways to do it and here's one way to achieve this goal.
# for file in `find /tmp/songs *.mp3 -type f`; do uppername=`basename $file | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]`; dirs=`dirname $file`; mv $file $dirs/$uppername; done

The modular equivalent of the above command would be like

# fetch those *.mp3 files recursively starting from /tmp/songs
for file in `find /tmp/songs *.mp3 -type f`;
do
# convert filename (without the directory path) to uppercase
uppername=`basename $file | tr [:lower:] [:upper:]`;
# preserved the directory path
# to avoid attempts of renaming/moving directory as well
dirs=`dirname $file`;
# now rename smallfilename to BIGFILENAME appended from original directory path
mv $file $dirs/$uppername;
done
# exit

You can modify the above and change a few lines of it or maybe use a while loop instead of for loop. You can also use xargs for passing arguments but the concept would still be the same of changing the the lowercase letters to uppper case letters of filenames recursively.

Take a look on what we have achieved using a one line renaming of multiple files


# find /tmp/songs *.MP3 -type f
output:
/tmp/songs/dir1/FILE2.MP3
/tmp/songs/dir1/dir5/FILE3.MP3
/tmp/songs/dir2/FILE4.MP3
/tmp/songs/dir2/dir3/dir4/FILE6.MP3
/tmp/songs/dir2/dir3/FILE5.MP3
/tmp/songs/FILE1.MP3
/tmp/songs/FILEFILE1.MP3
FILE1.MP3
FILEFILE1.MP3

Noticed that all lowercase MP3 files are converted to their uppercase form, which was done on recursive manner. You can also apply this approach to recursively rename and remove space characters from filenames under group subdirectory folder locations.

Linux makes simple task easier.

Hope this helps.