Batch renaming files in command line and Xargs

Question

So, I have the following structure:

.
..
a.png
b.png 
c.png

I ran a command to resize them

ls | xargs -I xx convert xx -res         


        

Answer 1

I'm late to this party by about 3 years, I just had a similar problem which I figured out myself. I had a list of png files which I converted using inkscape, because ImageMagick's svg support is poor.

I originally converted them by doing:

find . -name "*.svg" -exec inkscape {} --export-png={}.png

Which of course led to the same issue like posted above.

file1.svg
file1.svg.png
file2.svg
file2.svg.png
file3.svg
file3.svg.png
file4.svg
file4.svg.png

I wanted to rename *.svg.png to *.png, this is what I wound up with...

find . -name "*.svg.png" -print0 | sed 's/.svg.png//g' | xargs -0 -I namePrefix mv namePrefix.svg.png namePrefix.png

This does three things:

1. find in this directory files named *.svg.png, the -print0 prints to standard output
2. sed modifies the standard output, basically swap .svg.png with nothing, so I'd get: file1/file2/file3/file4
3. xargs -0 to get the data from sed, -I references the filename w/o the extension, then mv original filename to new filename. The word namePrefix isn't anything special, just wanted to make it clear.

EDIT

I realize now this is the most convoluted way to do this. One can simply use the rename command.

rename 's/svg\.png/.png/' *