Remove whitespaces from filenames in Linux

Question

I have hundreds of jpg files in different folders like this:

Basically, I need to remove the SPACES. I already know the command to change the spaces into underscores:

$ rename "s/ /_/g" *

But I do not need the underscores in this case. I just need to remove the space. I tried the following, but it didn't work:

$ rename "s/ //g" *

Any help would be appreciated.

score 42 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 11 '13 at 20:25

42

The following would work in case it was really a space.

$ rename "s/ //g" *

Try

$ rename "s/\s+//g" *

\s is a whitespace character, belonging to the set of [ \t\r\n].

answered Mar 11 '13 at 20:25

1

How do you know if it really is a space character? To me it looks like a space. BTW, $ rename "s/\s+//g" * didn't work either. – Sam Timalsina Mar 11 '13 at 20:27
1

@SamTimalsina The underscores substitution worked for you, but the space won't? That seems very unlikely. – Anirudh Ramanathan Mar 11 '13 at 20:35
Yep. It didn't work. I downloaded the files off from Dropbox. I have already lost like 2+ hours on this. – Sam Timalsina Mar 11 '13 at 20:37
1

thanks for this, I had no idea you could do this without xargs. – leo Jan 05 '14 at 19:57
What is rename here? In my distro (ArchLinux), rename 2.35.2 ( util-linux package). It does not have this options but `rename [options] expression replacement file...`, ie. no 's/ //g' available. – Artyom Jul 06 '20 at 09:01
Does `` there not take a regex? – Anirudh Ramanathan Jul 06 '20 at 14:48
@Artyom `prename` it seems (on Fedora). – user598527 Apr 20 '22 at 22:19

score 25 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 11 '13 at 20:31

25

You could do something like this:

IFS="\n"
for file in *.jpg;
do
    mv "$file" "${file//[[:space:]]}"
done

answered Mar 11 '13 at 20:31

Blake

This works!!! Thank you very much! Can you explain why $ rename "s/ //g" * was not working? – Sam Timalsina Mar 11 '13 at 20:39
$ rename "s/ //g" * works OK for me. Maybe there is something weird with your environment. Are you using bash? – Blake Mar 11 '13 at 21:29
Yes I am using bash. Must be something weird with my environment. – Sam Timalsina Mar 12 '13 at 14:42
I am also receiving `command not found: rename` in zsh – Mike Lyons Apr 08 '15 at 21:28

2 Answers2