Hello everyone,

Hoping that this is a good place to post a question about Bash scripting. My wife and I have run into a problem in PhotoPrism where it keeps tagging pictures and videos with similar names together and so the thumbnail and the video do not match. I decided that rather than try to get her iPhone to tweak its naming it’s easier to just offload to a directory then rename every file to a UUID before sending to photoprism. I’m trying to write a bash script to simplify this but cannot get the internal loop to fire. The issue appears to be with the ‘while IFS= read -r -d ‘’ file; do’ portion. Is anyone able to spot what the issue may be?

#! /bin/bash
echo "This script will rename all files in this directory with unique names. Continue? (Y/N)"
read proceed
if [[ "$proceed" == "Y" ]]; then
	echo "Proceed"
	#use uuidgen -r to generate a random UUID.
	#Currently appears to be skipping the loop entirely. the find command works so issue should be after the pipe.
	   
# Troubleshooting
#Seems like changing IFS to $IFS helped. Now however it's also pulling others., don't think this is correct.
#verified that the find statement is correct, its the parsing afterwards that's wrong.
#tried removing the $'\0' after -d as that is string null in c. went to bash friendly '' based on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57497365/what-does-the-bash-read-d-do
#issue definitely appears to be with the while statement
	find ./ -type f \( -iname \*.jpg -o -iname \*.png \) | while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do
	   echo "in loop"
	   echo "$file"
	   #useful post https://itsfoss.gitlab.io/post/how-to-find-and-rename-files-in-linux/
	   #extract the directory and filename
	   dir=$(dirname "$file")
	   base=$(basename "$file")
	   echo "'$dir'/'$base'"
	   #use UUID's to get around photoprism poor handling of matching file names and apples high collision rate
	   new_name="$dir/$(uuidgen -r)"
	   echo "Renaming ${file} to ${new_name}"
	   #mv "$file" "$new_name" #uncomment to actually perform the rename.
	done
	echo "After loop"
else
	echo "Cancelling"
fi
  • ravenaspiring@sh.itjust.works
    320·
    8 hours ago

    We could diagnose it for you… Or you could ask the same question of an LLM and get a more interactive answer.

    https://chat.qwen.ai/ is capable of answering for free

    Or several other free models like Qwen-coder ollama/deepseek-r1, kimi k2, Kat koder pro, etc

    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
      112·
      7 hours ago

      With all due respect, you’re being an pain in the ass for contributing to stealing millions from people who need to buy RAM for new computer. Pardon my French but fuck off with that LLM bullshit already.

    • Badabinski@kbin.earth
      41·
      6 hours ago

      Shell scripts are one of the worst possible applications of an LLM. They’re trained on shit fucking GitHub scripts, and they give you shit in return.

      • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        3 hours ago

        I’m totally in favor of people asking other people for help with these things. But here’s what Claude gave.

        Found the Issue!

        The problem is a mismatch between your find output and what read expects:

        • find with a regular pipe outputs newline-separated filenames
        • read -r -d '' expects null-terminated input (the -d '' means “use null byte as delimiter”)

        Solution 1: Use -print0 with find (Recommended)

        Change your find command to use -print0:

        find ./ -type f \( -iname "*.jpg" -o -iname "*.png" \) -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do

        Solution 2: Remove -d '' from read

        find ./ -type f \( -iname "*.jpg" -o -iname "*.png" \) | while IFS= read -r file; do

        Additional Issues to Fix:

        1. Quote your wildcards: -iname \*.jpg should be -iname "*.jpg" to prevent shell expansion
        2. File extension preservation: Your script generates UUIDs but loses the file extension (.jpg, .png). You probably want to keep those!

        Improved Script:

        #! /bin/bash
echo "This script will rename all files in this directory with unique names. Continue? (Y/N)"
read proceed
if [[ "$proceed" == "Y" ]]; then
    echo "Proceed"
    
    find ./ -type f \( -iname "*.jpg" -o -iname "*.png" \) -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do
        echo "in loop"
        echo "$file"
        
        # Extract the directory and extension
        dir=$(dirname "$file")
        ext="${file##*.}"  # Get file extension
        
        # Generate new name with UUID but keep extension
        new_name="$dir/$(uuidgen -r).$ext"
        
        echo "Renaming ${file} to ${new_name}"
        # mv "$file" "$new_name"  # Uncomment to actually perform the rename
    done
    echo "After loop"
else
    echo "Cancelling"
fi

        The key changes:

        • Added -print0 to find
        • Quoted the wildcard patterns
        • Preserved file extensions using ${file##*.}

        Try this and let me know if it works!

      • SchwertImStein@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        4 hours ago
        find ./ -type f ( -iname '*.jpg' -o -iname '*.png' ) -print0 |
while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do
  echo "in loop"
  echo "$file"
  dir=$(dirname "$file")
  base=$(basename "$file")
  echo "'$dir'/'$base'"
  new_name="$dir/$(uuidgen -r)"
  echo "Renaming ${file} to ${new_name}"
  # mv "$file" "$new_name"
done

        That’s what perplexity gave me after copy pasting the post.