Removing changing pattern from filenames in directory in Linux - linux

I have a directory containing files following the following naming convention:
Label_0000_AA.gz
Label_0001_BB.gz
Label_0002_CC.gz
...
All I want to do is to rename these files so that the _#### number pattern is removed, resulting in:
Label_AA.gz
Label_BB.gz
Label_CC.gz
...
but only up to a certain number. E.g.: I may have 10000 files but might only want to remove the pattern in the first 3000. Would this be possible using something like bash?

If you don't have prename or rename -
(assuming the names are consistent)
for f in Label_[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]_[A-Z][A-Z].gz
do mv "$f" "${f//_[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]/}"
done
To just do a certain range -
for n in {0000..2999}
do for f in Label_${n}_??.gz
do mv $f ${f//_$n/}
done
done
You're sure there are not collisions?

If you can name the pattern you want to change/remove in a regex you can use the command prename:
prename 's/_[0-3][[:digit:]]{3}_/_/g' Label_*.gz
This regex would only remove numbers 0000-3999.
Using the flag -n does a "dry-run" and shows what it would do.
Edit: Thanks #KamilCuk to remind me about two renames. I made it clear and changed the name to prename.

Related

moving files from a folder into subfolders based on the prefix number with Linux

I'm relatively new to bash and I have tried multiples solutions that I could find here but none of them seem to be working in my case. It's pretty simple, I have a folder that looks like this:
- images/
- 0_image_1.jpg
- 0_image_2.jpg
- 0_image_3.jpg
- 1_image_1.jpg
- 1_image_2.jpg
- 1_image_3.jpg
and I would like to move these jpg files into subfolders based on the prefix number like so:
- images_0/
- 0_image_1.jpg
- 0_image_2.jpg
- 0_image_3.jpg
- images_1/
- 1_image_1.jpg
- 1_image_2.jpg
- 1_image_3.jpg
Is there a bash command that could do that in a simple way ?
Thank you
for src in *_*.jpg; do
dest=images_${src%%_*}/
echo mkdir -p "$dest"
echo mv -- "$src" "$dest"
done
Remove both echos if the output looks good.
I would do this with rename a.k.a. Perl rename. It is extremely powerful and performant. Here's a command for your use case:
rename --dry-run -p '$_="images_" . substr($_,0,1) . "/" . $_' ?_*jpg
Let's dissect that. At the right end, we specify we only want to work on files that start with a single character/digit before an underscore so we don't do damage trying to apply the command to files it wasn't meant for. Then --dry-run means it doesn't actually do anything, it just shows you what it would do - this is a very useful feature. Then -p which handily means "create any necessary directories for me as you go". Then the meat of the command. It passes you the current filename in a variable called $_ and we then need to create a new variable called $_ to say what we want the file to be called. In this case we just want the word images_ followed by the first digit of the existing filename and then a slash and the original name. Simples!
Sample Output
'0_image_1.jpg' would be renamed to 'images_0/0_image_1.jpg'
'0_image_2.jpg' would be renamed to 'images_0/0_image_2.jpg'
'1_image_3.jpg' would be renamed to 'images_1/1_image_3.jpg'
Remove the --dry-run and run again for real, if the output looks good.
Using rename has several benefits:
that it will warn and avoid any conflicts if two files rename to the same thing,
that it can rename across directories, creating any necessary intermediate directories on the way,
that you can do a dry run first to test it,
that you can use arbitrarily complex Perl code to specify the new name.
Note: On macOS, you can install rename using homebrew:
brew install rename
Note: On some Ones, rename is referred to as prename for Perl rename.

Linux rename files based on input file

I need to rename hundreds of files in Linux to change the unique identifier of each from the command line. For sake of examples, I have a file containing:
old_name1 new_name1
old_name2 new_name2
and need to change the names from new to old IDs. The file names contain the IDs, but have extra characters as well. My plan is therefore to end up with:
abcd_old_name1_1234.txt ==> abcd_new_name1_1234.txt
abcd_old_name2_1234.txt ==> abcd_new_name2_1234.txt
Use of rename is obviously fairly helpful here, but I am struggling to work out how to iterate through the file of the desired name changes and pass this as input into rename?
Edit: To clarify, I am looking to make hundreds of different rename commands, the different changes that need to be made are listed in a text file.
Apologies if this is already answered, I've has a good hunt, but can't find a similar case.
rename 's/^(abcd_)old_name(\d+_1234\.txt)$/$1new_name$2/' *.txt
Should work, depending on whether you have that package installed. Also have a look at qmv (rename-utils)
If you want more options, use e.g.
shopt -s globstart
rename 's/^(abcd_)old_name(\d+_1234\.txt)$/$1new_name$2/' folder/**/*.txt
(finds all txt files in subdirectories of folder), or
find folder -type f -iname '*.txt' -exec rename 's/^(abcd_)old_name(\d+_1234\.txt)$/$1new_name$2/' {} \+
To do then same using GNU find
while read -r old_name new_name; do
rename "s/$old_name/$new_name/" *$old_name*.txt
done < file_with_names
In this way, you read the IDs from file_with_names and rename the files replacing $old_name with $new_name leaving the rest of the filename untouched.
I was about to write a php function to do this for myself, but I came upon a faster method:
ls and copy & paste the directory contents into excel from the terminal window. Perhaps you may need to use on online line break removal or addition tool. Assume that your file names are in column A In excel, use the following formula in another column:
="mv "&A1&" prefix"&A1&"suffix"
or
="mv "&A1&" "&substitute(A1,"jpeg","jpg")&"suffix"
or
="mv olddirectory/"&A1&" newdirectory/"&A1
back in Linux, create a new file with
nano rename.txt and paste in the values from excel. They should look something like this:
mv oldname1.jpg newname1.jpg
mv oldname1.jpg newname2.jpg
then close out of nano and run the following command:
bash rename.txt. Bash just runs every line in the file as if you had typed it.
and you are done! This method gives verbose output on errors, which is handy.

script or command to change the starting index number of a set of sequentially numbered files

i have a set of files named img1.png , img2.png ,...img10.png,.. and so on. what i want to achieve is renaming these files so that the starting index is increased by 30 such that the files become img31.png, img32.png,.....img40.png,....and so on. Is this possible using the "rename" command? or is a script required? in either case how do i do this?
related - for this to work do i have to first rename the files to img001.png, img002.png, ...img010.png , and so on? how is this to be done, if required?
add 30 to the numbers in each filename
rename 's/(\d+)/$1+30/e' *png
rename to be 3 digits long
rename 's/(\d+)/sprintf("%03d",$1)/e' *png
See perldoc perlre http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html for details of how this works, rename is a perl program
LOCATION=/my/image/directory #change this to your location
for file in $(ls -1 ${LOCATION})
do
ind=$(echo ${file}|cut -c 4-|cut -d"." -f1)
(( newind=${ind}+30 ))
mv ${LOCATION}/${file} ${LOCATION}/img${newind}.png
done
I am sure there is much more elegant way of doing this on one line using likes of awk/sed/perl etc, but this shows you the logic behind it.
Hope it helps

Using wildcards to exclude files with a certain suffix

I am experimenting with wildcards in bash and tried to list all the files that start with "xyz" but does not end with ".TXT" but getting incorrect results.
Here is the command that I tried:
$ ls -l xyz*[!\.TXT]
It is not listing the files with names "xyz" and "xyzTXT" that I have in my directory. However, it lists "xyz1", "xyz123".
It seems like adding [!\.TXT] after "xyz*" made the shell look for something that start with "xyz" and has at least one character after it.
Any ideas why it is happening and how to correct this command? I know it can be achieved using other commands but I am especially interested in knowing why it is failing and if it can done just using wildcards.
These commands will do what you want
shopt -s extglob
ls -l xyz!(*.TXT)
shopt -u extglob
The reason why your command doesn't work is beacause xyz*[!\.TXT] which is equivalent to xyz*[!\.TX] means xyz followed by any sequence of character (*) and finally a character in set {!,\,.,T,X} so matches 'xyzwhateveryouwant!' 'xyzwhateveryouwant\' 'xyzwhateveryouwant.' 'xyzwhateveryouwantT' 'xyzwhateveryouwantX'
EDIT: where whateveryouwant does not contain any of !\.TX
I don't think this is doable with only wildcards.
Your command isn't working because it means:
Match everything that has xyz followed by whatever you want and it must not end with sequent character: \, .,T and X. The second T doesn't count as far as what you have inside [] is read as a family of character and not as a string as you thought.
You don't either need to 'escape' . as long as it has no special meaning inside a wildcard.
At least, this is my knowledge of wildcards.

Linux rename function not being used correctly

I'm trying to use the rename command in a Terminal in Ubuntu to append a string to the beginning of some avi file names as follows.
rename -n 's/(\w)\.avi$/String_to_add__$1\.avi/' *.avi
So I expect the following:
String_to_add_MyMovie.avi
Problem is that when I run the command it appends the string to the end of the file name, so I end up with the following:
MyMovie_String_to_add_.avi
I'm not sure if I have the perlexpr syntax wrong or something else. Any insight is appreciated.
UPDATE:
Thanks for the suggestions, I tried the suggestions from alno and plundra and made the following modification:
rename -n 's/(\w+)\.avi$/String_to_add__$1\.avi/' *.avi
But now the file gets the string inserted in the middle of the name as follows:
My_String_to_add_Movie
My apologies though, I neglected to mention that the titles are preceded by 3 numeric values, so the file name nomenclature is {3 numbers}-My_Movie.avi so for example 001-My_Movie.avi. But I didn't think this would make a difference since I'm assuming \w+ matches alphanumeric characters, might the '-' be the issue?
Haven't tried Christian's approach yet, I want to be able to use the rename command, or at least understand why it's not working before I try a different approach.
I don't think rename -n is standard. You could do this:
for i in *.avi; do mv $i String_to_add_$i; done
You're only matching a single character with \w, you want \w+, so the complete line would be:
rename -n 's/(\w+)\.avi$/String_to_add__$1\.avi/' *.avi
Correct version:
rename -n 's/(\w+)\.avi$/String_to_add__$1\.avi/' *.avi
You simply forgot + after \w, so it tried to match only one character.

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