Bash script to remove leading white spaces from files names

Question

So I have a bunch of files like:

 Aaron Lewis - Country Boy.cdg
 Aaron Lewis - Country Boy.mp3
 Adele - Rolling In The Deep.cdg
 Adele - Rolling In The Deep.mp3
 Adele - Set Fire To The Rain.cdg
 Adele - Set Fire To The Rain.mp3
 Band Perry - Better Dig Two.cdg
 Band Perry - Better Dig Two.mp3
 Band Perry - Pioneer.cdg
 Band Perry - Pioneer.mp3

and I need to have the leading whitespace removed in bash or fish script.

Answer 1

To remove the leading white space char in the file names you provided you can use:

 IFS=$'\n'
 for f in $(find . -type f -name ' *')
 do 
     mv $f ${f/\.\/ /\.\/}
 done

This:

• changes the IFS to only be newline characters; this way it does not choke on the whitespaces in the file names.
• finds all files starting with a whitespace in the current directory.
• moves each file to a file name without the leading whitespace, using bash substring substitution.

Answer 2

for x in \ * ; do
  mv "$x" `echo "$x" | sed "s/^ +//"`
done

This is quick and dirty.

Answer 3

cat <file> | sed -e 's/^[ ]*//'

should do the trick. Capture stdout and write to a file.

Answer 4

You don't need sed for this. Just use bash string function:

for file in /path/to/files/*; 
    do mv "$file" "${file# *}"; 
done