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renaming files containing a space from the Linux command line

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Every year I make a book of photos from the kids' past year. It's my Christmas present to my parents and other family members. This means I'm managing a lot of photo files. Recently my wife's contributions come in the form of .heic files from her iPhone. For some reason my photo-editing software doesn't work well with .heic files so I use a converter to make .png or .jpg files.

Sadly, the converter inserts " conv" into the file name of its output. This introduces a space into the file name. Because my website CMS is designed around a certain file naming convention, I then have to remove the " conv" string from the names.

And that's where batch operations with Linux hit a snag. I've worked around the problem in a two-part script. The first script generates the second, so I run them like this:

./fix.sh > fixes.sh

./fixes.sh

Here are the contents of fix.sh:

#!/bin/bash
a=$(echo '*conv*') # remember this trick?
for b in $a
 do
 c="'$b'" # put single quotes around the name containing the space character
 d=$(echo $b | sed 's/ conv//')
 echo "mv $c $d"
 done