Rename multiple files in multiple subdirectories using for loop

Question

I am trying to rename files with the same names in different subdirectories using for loop.They should be renamed according to the name of subdirectory.

Subdirectory1/File.txt
Subdirectory2/File.txt

should look like

Subdirectory1/Subdirectory1.txt
Subdirectory2/Subdirectory2.txt

I tried many commands and I am getting different errors. The last command, which I found on forum also doesn't work. Can somebody help me?

dir="Subdirectory1, Subdirectory2"
declare -i count=1 for file in "$dir"/*.txt; do
mv "$file" "${dir}/${dir} ${count}.txt"
count+=1
done

After running this, I get:

mv: cannot stat ‘/*/*.txt’: No such file or directory

Answer 1

You can use code like this.

#!/bin/bash

# Loop across the list of directories
for dir in Subdirectory1 Subdirectory2
do
    # Only consider directories
    [ -d "$dir" ] || continue

    # Loop across any files in each directory
    for src in "$dir"/*.txt
    do
        dst="$dir/$dir.txt"
        
        # Only rename a file if it won't overwrite another one
        if [ -f "$dst" ]
        then
            # Refuse to overwrite
            echo "Target file already exists: $dst" >&2
        else
            # If the file already has the right name just skip
            [ -f "$src" ] && [ "$src" != "$dst" ] && mv -f -- "$src" "$dst"
        fi
    done
done

Prepare the script (let's say it's called renamethem) with chmod a+x renamethem. And then run it as ./renamethem.

You'll see the list of directories is hard-coded in the for loop. There are a couple of other ways to handle this a little more elegantly. You could provide the list on the command line (./renamethem Subdirectory1 Subdirectory2) in which case change one line to for dir in "$@" to pick the parameters from that command line. Or you could use an array (list). Or you could use * to match all directories in the current directory.