linux rename files in bulk using bash script or command line one liner - linux

I have a list of for example 100 files with the naming convention
<date>_<Time>_XYZ.xml.abc
<date>_<Time>_XYZ.xml
<date>_<Time>_XYZ.csv
for example
20140730_025373_XYZ.xml
20140730_015233_XYZ.xml.ab
20140730_015233_XYZ.csv
Now I want to write script which will remove anything between two underscores. for example in the above case
remove 015233 and change 20140730_015233_XYZ.xml.ab to 20140730_XYZ.xml.ab
remove 015233 and change 20140730_015233_XYZ.csv to 20140730_XYZ.csv
I have tried number of various options using rename, cut, mv but I am getting varied results, not the one which I expect.

You could use rename command if you want to rename files present inside the current directory,
rename 's/^([^_]*)_[^_]*(_.*)$/$1$2/g' *

You can use sed:
sed 's/\([^_]*\)_.*_\(.*\)/\1_\2/' files.list

You can also use cut command
cut -d'_' -f1,3 filename

for FILE in *; do mv "$FILE" "${FILE/_*_/_}"; done
And more specific is
for FILE in *.xml *.xml.ab *.csv; do mv "$FILE" "${FILE/_*_/_}"; done
Further:
for FILE in *_*_*.xml *_*_*.xml.ab *_*_*.csv; do mv "$FILE" "${FILE/_*_/_}"; done

Related

Alternative for AWK use

I'd love to have a more elegant solution for a mass rename of files, as shown below. Files were of format DEV_XYZ_TIMESTAMP.dat and we needed them as T-XYZ-TIMESTAMP.dat.
In the end, I copied them all (to be on the same side) into renamed folder:
ls -l *dat|awk '{system("cp " $10 " renamed/T-" substr($10, index($10, "_")+1))}'
So, first I listed all dat files, then picked up 10th column (file name) and executed a command using awk's system function.
The command was essentially copying of original filename into renamed folder with new file name.
New file name was created by removing (awk substring function) prefix before (including) _ and adding "T-" prefix.
Effectively:
cp DEV_file.dat renamed/T-file.dat
Is there a way to use cp or mv together with some regex rules to achieve the same in a bit more elegant way?
Thx
You may use this script:
for file in *.dat; do
f="${file//_/-}"
mv "$file" renamed/T-"${f#*-}"
done
You must avoid parsing output of ls command.
If you have rename utilitity
rename -E "s/[^_]*/T/" -e "s/_/-/g" *dat
Demo
$ls -1
ABC_DEF_TIMESTAMP.dat
DEV_XYZ_TIMESTAMP.dat
$rename -E "s/[^_]*/T/" -e "s/_/-/g" *
$ls -1
T-DEF-TIMESTAMP.dat
T-XYZ-TIMESTAMP.dat
$
This is how I would do it:
cpdir=renamed
for file in *dat; do
newfile=$(echo "$file" | sed -e "s/[^_]*/T/" -e "y/_/-/")
cp "$file" "$cpdir/$newfile"
done
The sed scripts transforms every non-underscore leading characters in a single T and then replaces every _ with -. If cpdir is not sure to exist before execution, you can simply add mkdir "$cpdir" after first line.

rename all files in folder through regular expression

I have a folder with lots of files which name has the following structure:
01.artist_name - song_name.mp3
I want to go through all of them and rename them using the regexp:
/^d+\./
so i get only :
artist_name - song_name.mp3
How can i do this in bash?
You can do this in BASH:
for f in [0-9]*.mp3; do
mv "$f" "${f#*.}"
done
Use the Perl rename utility utility. It might be installed on your version of Linux or easy to find.
rename 's/^\d+\.//' -n *.mp3
With the -n flag, it will be a dry run, printing what would be renamed, without actually renaming. If the output looks good, drop the -n flag.
Use 'sed' bash command to do so:
for f in *.mp3;
do
new_name="$(echo $f | sed 's/[^.]*.//')"
mv $f $new_name
done
...in this case, regular expression [^.].* matches everything before first period of a string.

Partial File Rename with different file types

Sorry if this is very simple compared to usual questions but I am just starting out. I have some files all with the same start name but of different file types, e.g:
1234.x
1234.y
1234.z
1234_V2.x
1234_V2.y
1234_V2.z
I want to rename the first part of these whilst keeping any ending and file type, e.g:
4321.x
4321.y
4321.z
4321_V2.x etc
I have tried using
mv 1234* 4321*
and
rename 1234* 4321*
But no luck! I have also been through all the other SO articles and although I could use a loop, most depend on the file type being the same.
Thanks in advance
You can use bash substitution:
for file in 1234*
do mv "$file" "4321${file#1234}"
done
OR, replace the do mv with the following
do mv "$file" "${file/1234/4321}"
See more in man bash under EXPANSION section, sub-section Parameter Expansion
Assuming your filenames for 1234 and 4321 i.e constant for all files, you can try this
for fn in `find . -name 1234*`
do
newf=`echo $fn | sed s/1234/4321/`
mv $fn $newfn
done
You can use a shell script, but it's kind of ugly because it will fork a lot, and thus, if you have a lot of files to rename, it will take time.
for f in 1234*; do echo mv $f $(echo $f | sed -e 's/1234/4321/'); done
Otherwize, rename is a good way to do it:
rename 's/1234/4321/' 1234*
Rename expects a regular expression as first parameter, see online documentation
See if it works:
rename "s/1234/4321/" 1234*
command means substitute(because of s) occurances of "1234" with "4321" in files that has name of pattern 1234*
You can also look at here. It is slightly more complicated than your case.

Move files and rename - one-liner

I'm encountering many files with the same content and the same name on some of my servers. I need to quarantine these files for analysis so I can't just remove the duplicates. The OS is Linux (centos and ubuntu).
I enumerate the file names and locations and put them into a text file.
Then I do a for statement to move the files to quarantine.
for file in $(cat bad-stuff.txt); do mv $file /quarantine ;done
The problem is that they have the same file name and I just need to add something unique to the filename to get it to save properly. I'm sure it's something simple but I'm not good with regex. Thanks for the help.
Since you're using Linux, you can take advantage of GNU mv's --backup.
while read -r file
do
mv --backup=numbered "$file" "/quarantine"
done < "bad-stuff.txt"
Here's an example that shows how it works:
$ cat bad-stuff.txt
./c/foo
./d/foo
./a/foo
./b/foo
$ while read -r file; do mv --backup=numbered "$file" "./quarantine"; done < "bad-stuff.txt"
$ ls quarantine/
foo foo.~1~ foo.~2~ foo.~3~
$
I'd use this
for file in $(cat bad-stuff.txt); do mv $file /quarantine/$file.`date -u +%s%N`; done
You'll get everyfile with a timestamp appended (in nanoseconds).
You can create a new file name composed by the directory and the filename. Thus you can add one more argument in your original code:
for ...; do mv $file /quarantine/$(echo $file | sed 's:/:_:g') ; done
Please note that you should replace the _ with a proper character which is special enough.

Batch rename of files with similar names

I have a series of files named like such:
file 1.jpeg
file 2.jpeg
file 3.jpeg
...
file 40.jpeg
I would like remove the space from all of their filenames without having to individually do it. I know its possible using something like: file{1,40}.jpeg or something like that but i can't remember and I don't even know how to search for it.
Thanks!
EDIT: linux
http://www.google.es/search?q=shell+rename+similar+files+in+a+directory
The first result is http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/150
Using the perl rename command [...] we can also, for example, strip spaces from filenames with this:
~$ rename 's/ //' *.jpeg
In other posts I've found this kind of commands that do not require perl:
for f in *; do mv "$f" `echo $f | tr --delete ' '`; done
I've not tried any of them.

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