Remove spaces recursively from all subdirectories of a directory 

find /path/to/dir -type d | tac | while read LINE; do target=$(dirname "$LINE")/$(basename "$LINE" | tr -d ' '); echo mv "$LINE" "$target"; done

September 20, 2011 — bashoneliners

Explanation

  • find path_to_dir -type d finds all the subdirectories
  • tac reverses the order. This is important to make "leaf" directories come first!
  • target=... stuff constructs the new name, removing spaces from the leaf component and keeping everything before that the same
  • echo mv ... for safety you should run with "echo" first, if the output looks good then remove the "echo" to really perform the rename

Limitations

In UNIX or BSD there is no tac. There you can use tail -r instead.

file-management directory-manipulation
read while tr echo find mv dirname tac basename