Perl Question
How to change all hidden folders/files to visible in a multiple sub directories
I have hundreds of sub directories in a directory that all have hidden files in them that I need to remove the period at the beginning of them to make them visible. I found a command to go into each directory and change them to make them visible but I need to know how to make this command work from one directory up.
rename 's/\.//;' .*
I have tried about an hour to modify this to work one level up but don't understand the Perl string enough to do it. If someone could help out I am sure it's simple and I just can't land on the right answer.
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Answer Source
This requires a find that supports the + (can use \; instead, which will call rename multiple times), but even POSIX find specifies it:
find -mindepth 1 -depth -exec rename -n 's{/\.([^\/]*$)}{/$1}' {} +
- The
-depthoption prevents directories from being renamed before all the files in them are renamed -mindepth 1prevents find from trying to rename the current directory,..-nis to just print what would be renamed instead of actually renaming (has to be removed to do the renaming).- The regular expression removes the last period after which there are no forward slashes, if it is preceded by a forward slash.
rename doesn't overwrite existing files, unless the -f ("force") option is used.
For a test directory structure like this:
.
├── .dir1
│ ├── .dir2
│ │ ├── .dir3
│ │ │ └── .file2
│ │ └── .file1
│ ├── file3
│ └── .file6
├── dir5
│ └── .file5
├── .file4
├── test1.bar
└── test1.foo
the output is
rename(./dir5/.file5, ./dir5/file5)
rename(./.file4, ./file4)
rename(./.dir1/.file6, ./.dir1/file6)
rename(./.dir1/.dir2/.file1, ./.dir1/.dir2/file1)
rename(./.dir1/.dir2/.dir3/.file2, ./.dir1/.dir2/.dir3/file2)
rename(./.dir1/.dir2/.dir3, ./.dir1/.dir2/dir3)
rename(./.dir1/.dir2, ./.dir1/dir2)
rename(./.dir1, ./dir1)
and the result after removing -n is
.
├── dir1
│ ├── dir2
│ │ ├── dir3
│ │ │ └── file2
│ │ └── file1
│ ├── file3
│ └── file6
├── dir5
│ └── file5
├── file4
├── test1.bar
└── test1.foo
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