Replace Space With Underscore in Filename

kriwil — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 13:37:12 +0000

This is merely my personal note. I was about to rename all my files under a directory. I need to replace the space with underscore character ('_'). My first thought was a simple bash script to do that. Apparently, it’s been very long time since my last bash coding session. I spent 15 minutes reading how to read all files and rename them. And I got nothing.

Luckily, I know python. Stupid me. Why didn’t I think it at first time. It was couple minutes of python and all the spaces were replaced by underscores. Thanks to python. All I did were

$ python
Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Oct  5 2008, 19:24:49)
[GCC 4.3.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> files = os.listdir('./')
>>> for f in files:
...     os.rename(f, f.replace(' ', '_'))
...
>>>

Or if you want to save in a script, you could you this

#!/usr/bin/python

import os
import sys

files = os.listdir(sys.argv[1])
for f in files:
    os.rename(f, f.replace(' ', '_'))

The script takes the directory path as the argument. You could modify the script to use regex to have a better rename rule

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Replace Space With Underscore in Filename