Find and replace filename recursively in a directory

Question

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?

Answer 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.