Saturday, July 5, 2008

How to rename a set of files using ruby

While switching to Ubuntu from Debian, in order to use the same home directory partition, I had to rename old configurations files to a new one so that ubuntu can freely create its own new configurations. At the same I was not willing to delete the old configurations files.

This is how it was done using ruby

  1. #!/usr/bin/ruby
  2. dir = "/mnt/home/suresh"
  3. files = Dir.entries(dir)
  4. files.each do |f|
  5. next if f == "." or f == ".."
  6. if File.fnmatch('.*',f) then
  7. puts f
  8. newname = f + ".olddeb"
  9. File.rename(f,newname)
  10. end
  11. end
Comments:
Line 5: To ignore the current and parent directories
LIne 6. I wanted to rename only files/directories starting with . (hidden files in unix)
Line 7. prints the current files - just for information
Line 8. the new name is old one with a .olddeb extension
Line 9. Does actual renaming

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hello sir,,i dont know anything about ruby,this is how u can do this on python
//code starts here
import glob,shutil;
dir=glob.glob("/mnt/home/suresh/.*");
for content in dir:
shutil.move(content,content+".old")
//code ends here...thats all!!!!
glob function uses "." as a wild card and brings all names starting in it.It never brings "." and "..".The for loop goes through this list content and renames every file/directory starting with "." by appending ".old" to its end.

Unknown said...

Hi Anonymous student,

I am slowly getting interested in python..I have one colleague who is a strong advocate...may be I would study python later....thanks for your comments