Question

33

Replace All Colons From Filenames With Terminal

rated 0 times [ 33] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 17435 / 2 Years ago, mon, august 29, 2022, 7:54:37

I have a GB's worth of music on my HDD that was formatted with EXT4. I want to move these files to a FAT formatted HDD partition. However, I can't move most of my files because they have ":" in the names (For example, "Act 2: ....." for operas). Is there a way with command line to rename all of my files from "XXXX:XXXX" to "XXXX-XXXX"?

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ainlyyor

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1 Year ago

answered 2 Years ago eeperant · Accepted Answer

If all your files are in a single directory, try:

rename 's|:|-|g' *

(where * can be changed to something more restrictive if you'd like)

If you have many files in a directory tree, try this from the base of the tree:

find . -name "*:*" -exec rename 's|:|-|g' {} ;

You can add the option -n right after rename to have it tell you what it WOULD do without ACTUALLY doing it. This might help you avoid accidentally stepping on other files or something else bad...