6

In terminal I can rename a single file that starts with a dash, i.e. 

mv ./-file file

I can also rename all files in a directory that start with a dash, i.e.

for f in ./-*; do rename 's/-//' "$f"; done

However, how can I do this recursively. I have tried using the find command, the rename command, and a recursive for loop. By the way, a lot of the file names have more than one dash. I would only want to remove the first dash. Thanks!

jbrock
  • 3,417

2 Answers2

11

Using find and rename:

find . -iname '-*' -execdir rename -n 's:./-:./:' {} +

find . -iname '-*' matches all filenames beginning with a -, and then -execdir ... {} + runs the command with those filenames as arguments, after cding to the directory containing the files. This means that the command arguments always has filenames of the form ./-foo. Then it's easy to just match the - after the ./ in a regex.

muru
  • 207,228
2

I guess this should work as well

for i in $(find . -iname '-*') ; do mv $i $(echo $i | sed -e "s/-//"); done
nairoby
  • 21