If you followed my CLI improved then you'll know I'm a fan of the fd command which I'm able to use for a mass git file rename.
Doing a mass rename is typically simple in the command line (mv *.mjs *.js
- though I'm not sure off the top of my head if this will recurse directories, probably not), but doing a mass rename with git
is harder, especially as there's some kind of locking going on. This means that the mass git rename must be run sequentially.
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In my particular recent case, I wanted to rename all instances of .mjs
files (excluding node_modules
) to .js
. I've tried this before with xargs and kept failing but fd
makes it pretty easy.
The fd
command allows you execute a command against the results (similarly to xargs
) and usefully fd
also provides some useful additions for filename substitution:
{}
: A placeholder token that will be replaced with the path of the search result (documents/images/party.jpg){.}
: Like {}, but without the file extension (documents/images/party){/}
: A placeholder that will be replaced by the basename of the search result (party.jpg){//}
: Uses the parent of the discovered path (documents/images){/.}
: Uses the basename, with the extension removed (party)
Armed with this information, I can find all mjs files -e mjs
, and I can execute git mv
with the full path to the result as the first argument and the {.}
placeholder for the filename excluding the extension:
fd -e mjs -x git mv {} {.}.js -j1
The final argument (as above) is -j1
which tells fd
to run the commands in a single thread (by default fd
will run multiple threads - I don't recall how many) - this is important because git
will lock and unlock the git metadata files upon each rename.
Otherwise, that's it. A single command to git rename.