Rename Files Recursively Without Updating Date?

[Zudnic]

Hi, I have a bunch of videos that I want to upload to Google Photos. They need to have their extensions changed, but I want to preserve the date/time of the files so they are indexed properly.

 

Is there a single command that I can run that will:

• Recursively go through a directory and subdirectories and rename any file ending in '.foo' with '.bar'
• Do NOT update the file date/time

 

I've done some research on this online and it appears there are several approaches to do one or the other, but I cannot determine the best way to combine the two. I am also a little gun-shy as a n00b and I really only have one shot at this, if I screw up the dates/times they're not recoverable.

 

Thanks in advance!

[trurl]

Since this is your first post here and you don't mention it, are you talking about doing this on Unraid? 

[Zudnic]

Yes I am... I figured I'd start here although this is more of a generic FreeBSD question.

[civic95man]

You would probably need to 'copy' the source file to the destination using the --preserve=all option followed by deleting the source file (move [mv] doesn't allow to preserve timestamps).

 

i.e.

cp --preserve=all [source] [destination]

rm [source]

 

I'm not big on making scripts so perhaps someone else can help with that, or you can attempt it yourself.  Might want to not remove anything until you are sure it works, or create a dummy directory and files to test on.