Recently I needed to reuse some files by renaming them or just parts of the name that have a certain word in it. I started doing it manually, but as you can imagine it is a tedious, lengthy and error prone process. There had to be a better way to do it.

As I have learned in recent months, there usually is and is usually connected with shell/terminal :)

I wanted this to be a two part process where I could first see the proposed changes, and then execute them if needed

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find . -name '*Foo*' | awk '{print("mv "$1" "$1)}' | sed 's/Foo/Bar/2'

What this little nugget does is search in the directory for any directory and/or file that has foo in it (that is the -name ‘foo part), then uses awk to construct the mv commands, and then uses sed to replace Foo with Bar but only for the second match. The output would look something like this:

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mv x/Foo x/Bar
mv x/Foo.php x/Bar.php
mv x/y/Foo x/y/Bar

If you are happy with the result, you can then execute it by piping it to /bin/sh (or any other shell variant)

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find . -name '*Foo*' | awk '{print("mv "$1" "$1)}' | sed 's/Foo/Bar/2' | /bin/sh

And there you have it, files and directories are renamed.