this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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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

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[–] BingBong@sh.itjust.works 19 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Interesting, the code shows up correctly for me in firefox. I wonder if that's due to my instance?

This works perfectly! Thank you!!! In case anyone else finds themselves wondering about the ${0##*.} portion, I found this article to be very helpful. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30980062/0-and-0-in-sh

edit: You beat me to it with your link on parameter expansion. I'll be reading through that tonight as well. Thanks again.

[–] phaedrus@piefed.world 5 points 1 month ago

It might be instance related, I'm on PieFed, so perhaps the markdown implementation is different.

Also, I realized that the parameter expansion might not be straightforward and added the GNU docs on it, but looks like you found a post about it at the same time! Glad to hear it got you sorted out.

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 5 points 1 month ago

If you want more help with Bash in the future, this is the best resource I've found in 13 years of writing bash professionally: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/EnglishFrontPage

Bash FAQs and pitfalls are the primary sections to look at there.