How to GREP a substring of a filename for renaming files? - linux

Question

I have a lot of files that were named with example1_partofEx1A_individualfile_name.fil.
I have since organized the files into a directory structure so the path is ./example1/partofEx1A/example1_partofEx1A_individualfile_name.fil.
I am trying to write a script that can take the unnecessary info out of the filename. I basically want to grep the 'individualfile' part so I can use a loop and mv.
I have no experience with scripting, just some with matlab. Using ubuntu or macOS. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Maybe something like:
#!/bin/bash
cd /path/to/rootdir || exit
for file in *.fil;do
IFS=_ read dir1 dir2 individual <<<"$file"
if [ "$individual" ] ;then
test -d "$dir1/$dir2" || mkdir -p "$dir1/$dir2"
# mv -v "$file" "$dir1/$dir2/$individual"
mv -vt "$dir1/$dir2" "$file"
fi
done
As suggested by Charles Duffy's comment, I've added -p flag to mkdir in order to prevent race condition.

Answer 2

#!/usr/bin/env bash
for f in ./*/*/*; do
[[ $f =~ ^[.]/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/(.*) ]] || continue
dir1=${BASH_REMATCH[1]}
dir2=${BASH_REMATCH[2]}
filename=${BASH_REMATCH[3]}
[[ $filename = "${dir1}_${dir2}_"* ]] || continue
new_name=${filename#"${dir1}_${dir2}_"}
mv -- "$f" "${dir1}/${dir2}/$new_name"
done
Tested as follows:
testdir="$(mktemp -d)"
cd "$testdir" || exit
mkdir -p ./dirA/dirB
touch dirA/dirB/dirA_dirB_hello_world.txt
touch dirA/dirB/other_content_here.txt
for f in ./*/*/*; do
[[ $f =~ ^[.]/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/(.*) ]] || continue
dir1=${BASH_REMATCH[1]}
dir2=${BASH_REMATCH[2]}
filename=${BASH_REMATCH[3]}
[[ $filename = "${dir1}_${dir2}_"* ]] || continue
new_name=${filename#"${dir1}_${dir2}_"}
mv -- "$f" "${dir1}/${dir2}/$new_name"
done
...whereupon the directory contains:
./dirA
./dirA/dirB
./dirA/dirB/hello_world.txt
./dirA/dirB/other_content_here.txt

Answer 3

Assuming that the three parts (the first two to delete and the third to be kept) are always separated by underscores, this could be a possible solution:
for f in /path/to/rootdir/*; do
if [[ -f $f ]]; then
mv "$f" "$(echo "$f" | sed "s/\/.*_.*_/\//")"
fi
done
where /path/to/rootdir is the root directory of your structure.