Rename multiple files with two "."

[WayHaw]

Thank you for any help offered.

I have a directory of log files with the following name structure: (inherited this mess!)

localhost_access_log.2009-03-09.txt
localhost_access_log.2009-03-10.txt

I need to ftp these files to another system but because of the two "."s, ftp is reporting "Unknown File Extension".

Can anyone help with the rename command that can change the first "." to a "_" and still keep the date integrity? I would like to end up with the following:

localhost_access_log_2009-03-09.txt
localhost_access_log_2009-03-10.txt

If there is a posted solution that would help as well.

Regards,
Wayne

[Kieren]

You can use sed like so:

sed 's/\./_/'

This will do the following:

user@host:~$ echo "hello.world.txt" | sed 's/\.//'
helloworld.txt

[WayHaw]

Just realized that it may be simplier if the new file name was just:

2009-03-09.txt
2009-03-10.txt

That is, just pull the name from everything after the first "."

[WayHaw]

Thanks Kieren. Sorry to admit that I'm still pretty much a linux novice and will need a bit of hand-holding. Is your code issued from the command line? That's what I'm hoping to find. If so could you provide more detail?

Thanks,
Wayne

[Kieren]

sed can do that too:

user@host:~$ echo "localhost_access_log.2009-03-10.txt" | sed 's/localhost_access_log\.//'
2009-03-10.txt

[WayHaw]

Is there a way to build that into a statement so it can work for all files in the directory? I have close to 400 files and dread the thought of the manual work to change them one by one!

Appreciate your comebacks.

Wayne

[Kieren]

You can use a for loop:

for filename in `ls` ; do mv $filename `echo $filename | sed s/localhost_access_log\.//` ; done

Here is what happens when used:

kieren@mouse:~/temp$ ls
localhost_access_log_2009-03-09.txt  localhost_access_log_2009-03-10.txt  localhost_access_log_2009-03-11.txt
kieren@mouse:~/temp$ for filename in `ls` ; do mv $filename `echo $filename | sed s/localhost_access_log\.//` ; done
kieren@mouse:~/temp$ ls
2009-03-09.txt  2009-03-10.txt  2009-03-11.txt

Make sure you have a backup before you run it incase something crashes

[WayHaw]

That did it! Thanks so much Kieren.

[radoulov]

If you have the rename utility:

rename 's/localhost_access_log.//' localhost_access_log.*.txt

Or zsh:

autoload -U zmv
zmv 'localhost_access_log.(*.txt)' '$1'

Otherwise with Perl:

perl -e'
  map { 
    ($n = $_) =~ s/[^.]+\.//;
	rename $_, $n
	} glob "localhost_access_log.*.txt"
	'

Or pure shell:

for f in localhost_access_log.*.txt; do
  mv -- "$f" "${f#*.}"
done

[WayHaw]

Thanks Radoluv. A lot of great knowledge here.

This is one for the files!

Regards,
Wayne