How to rename a consistently-named subdirectory across multiple directories?

Question

I'm wanting to rename

123/1/ -> 123/v1/
foo/1/ -> foo/v1/
bar/1/ -> bar/v1/
345/1/ -> 345/v1/

I've searched and found a few related solutions, but not quite sure what is best in this instance. eg,

find . -wholename "*/1" -exec echo '{}' \;

successfully prints out all the paths relative to . , but {} expands to ./foo/1/ , so I can't move from {} to {}/v1 for instance. I also tried

find . -wholename "*/1" -exec mv '{}' $(echo '{}' | sed 's/1/v1/') \;

with the idea that I would be invoking mv./foo/1./foo/v1 , but apparently it tries to move .foo/1/ to a subdirectory of itself.

Anyhow, just looking for the simplest way to do this bulk renaming. To be clear, I'm trying to move the literal subdirectory 1 to v1 , not also 2 to v2 .

Answer 1

Something like this, untested, is IMHO the simplest way to do it using bash builtins and mandatory POSIX utils as long as your paths don't contain newlines:

while IFS= read -r old; do
    new="${old##*/}v1"
    echo mv -- "$old" $new"
done < <(find . -type d -name 1)

Remove echo once you're happy with the output from initial testing.

Answer 2

Like this, using perl rename (which may be different than the rename already existing on your system, use rename --version to check):

rename -n 's|([^/]+/)(1)|$1v$2|' */1/ 

remove -n (dry-run) when the outputs is ok for you.

(note that you can use globstar on bash or something similar on other shells to recurse into deeper sub-directories)

Answer 3

This was tagged with fish. A solution using fish shell:

for file in **/1/; mv $file (dirname $file)/v1; end

Answer 4

Try

find . -depth -type d -name 1 -execdir mv 1 v1 \;

• The -execdir option to find is not POSIX, but it is widely supported by find implementations.
• See What are the security issues and race conditions in using find -exec ? for useful information about the -execdir option.
• The -depth option is necessary both to support paths like foo/1/1/1 and to avoid warning messages when find can't traverse the newly-renamed 1 directories.

Answer 5

I would do it in straight Bash.

Given:

$ tree .
.
├── 123
│   └── 1
├── 345
│   └── 1
│       └── 1        # this is a file named '1'
├── bar
│   └── 1
└── foo
    └── 1
        └── file
8 directories, 2 files

You can do:

#!/bin/bash

shopt -s globstar
new_1="v1"

for src in **/*/1; do      # will RECURSIVELY find any directory '1'
                           # if just next level (as in example)
                           # you can just do */1
    [ -d "$src" ] || continue 
    tgt="${src%%/1}/$new_1"
    echo "./$src/ => ./$tgt/"
    mv  "./$src" "./$tgt/"
done 

Result:

$ tree .
.
├── 123
│   └── v1
├── 345
│   └── v1
│       └── 1
├── bar
│   └── v1
└── foo
    └── v1
        └── file
 8 directories, 2 files

If you want to insert parent directories, add one statement to create them:

shopt -s globstar
new_1="a parent/v1"         # the replacement path has a parent

for src in **/*/1; do 
    [ -d "$src" ] || continue 
    tgt="${src%%/1}/$new_1"
    [[ "/" == *"$new_1"* ]] || mkdir -p "${tgt%/*}"  # create parents if any
    echo "./$src/ => ./$tgt/"
    mv  "./$src" "./$tgt/"
done 

Result:

$ tree .
.
├── 123
│   └── a parent
│       └── v1
├── 345
│   └── a parent
│       └── v1
│           └── 1
├── bar
│   └── a parent
│       └── v1
└── foo
    └── a parent
        └── v1
            └── file
 12 directories, 2 files