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nabbisen
nabbisen

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Awk Commands to replace filenames

#awk #gawk #commandline

(Gnu's) Awk is a scripting language to manipulate text data.
This post shows how I replaced filenames using awk Commands.

I had translation dictionary files in Swedish aka "Sv"enska.

$ ls -1 translations/*.sv.* translations/about.sv.xliff ... translations/validators.sv.xliff
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Well, my goal was to get cp commands to duplicate them such as:

$ cp translations/about.sv.xliff translations/about.ja.xliff
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I was not used to awk.
Therefore, I first tried to print the same list with awk's print.

$ ls -1 translations/*.sv.* | \  awk '{ print $1; }' translations/about.sv.xliff ... translations/validators.sv.xliff
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Got 🙂
Next, I found awk has gsub as a standard library function. "gsub" exists in Ruby and I was familiar with it.

$ ls -1 translations/*.sv.* | \  awk '{ gsub(".sv.", ".ja.", $1); print $1; }' translations/about.ja.xliff ... translations/validators.ja.xliff
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I succeeded in replacing languages in filenames.
Then I lined up the original and the replaced.

$ ls -1 translations/*.sv.* | \  awk '{ print $1; gsub(".sv.", ".ja.", $1); print $1; }' translations/about.sv.xliff translations/about.ja.xliff ... ... translations/validators.sv.xliff translations/validators.ja.xliff
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Got, but I didn't want new lines between the original and the replaced.
Thus, I converted print to printf.

$ ls -1 translations/*.sv.* | \  awk '{ printf $1; gsub(".sv.", ".ja.", $1); print $1 }' translations/about.sv.xlifftranslations/about.ja.xliff ... translations/validators.sv.xlifftranslations/validators.ja.xliff
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It seemed necessary to insert space. Anyway, it was coming there soon.

ls -1 translations/*.sv.* | \  awk '{ printf "cp "$1" "; gsub(".sv.", ".ja.", $1); print $1";" }' cp translations/about.sv.xliff translations/about.ja.xliff; ... cp translations/validators.sv.xliff translations/validators.ja.xliff;
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I got the commands above. I ran them. They were successful.
After all, I got thanks to awk commands:

$ ls -1 translations/*.ja.* translations/about.ja.xliff translations/daterangepicker.ja.xliff translations/exceptions.ja.xliff translations/flashmessages.ja.xliff translations/invoice-calculator.ja.xliff translations/invoice-numbergenerator.ja.xliff translations/invoice-renderer.ja.xliff translations/messages.ja.xliff translations/pagerfanta.ja.xliff translations/plugins.ja.xliff translations/system-configuration.ja.xliff translations/validators.ja.xliff
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So sweet 🙂

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