Recursively prepend text to file names

Question

I want to prepend text to the name of every file of a certain type - in this case .txt files - located in the current directory or a sub-directory.

I have tried:

find -L . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec mv "{}" "PrependedTextHere{}" \;

The problem with this is dealing with the ./ part of the path that comes with the {} reference.

Any help or alternative approaches appreciated.

Answer 1

You can do something like this

find -L . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec bash -c 'echo "$0" "${0%/*}/PrependedTextHere${0##*/}"' {} \;

Where

• bash -c '...' executes the command
• $0 is the first argument passed in, in this case {} -- the full filename
• ${0%/*} removes everything including and after the last / in the filename
• ${0##*/} removes everything before and including the last / in the filename

Replace the echo with a mv once you're satisfied it's working.