Batch renaming files with Bash

Question

How can Bash rename a series of packages to remove their version numbers? I've been toying around with both expr and %%, to no avail.

Examples:

Xft2-2.1.13.pkg becomes Xft2.pkg

jasper-1.900.1.pkg becomes jasper.pkg

xorg-libXrandr-1.2.3.pkg becomes xorg-libXrandr.pkg

Answer 1

Thank you for this answers. I also had some sort of problem. Moving .nzb.queued files to .nzb files. It had spaces and other cruft in the filenames and this solved my problem:

find . -type f -name "*.nzb.queued" |
sed -ne "s/^\(\(.*\).nzb.queued\)$/mv -v \"\1\" \"\2.nzb\"/p" |
sh

It is based on the answer of Diomidis Spinellis.

The regex creates one group for the whole filename, and one group for the part before .nzb.queued and then creates a shell move command. With the strings quoted. This also avoids creating a loop in shell script because this is already done by sed.

Answer 2

better use sed for this, something like:

find . -type f -name "*.pkg" |
 sed -e 's/((.*)-[0-9.]*\.pkg)/\1 \2.pkg/g' |
 while read nameA nameB; do
    mv $nameA $nameB;
 done

figuring up the regular expression is left as an exercise (as is dealing with filenames that include spaces)

Answer 3

We can assume sed is available on any *nix, but we can't be sure it'll support sed -n to generate mv commands. (NOTE: Only GNU sed does this.)

Even so, bash builtins and sed, we can quickly whip up a shell function to do this.

sedrename() {
  if [ $# -gt 1 ]; then
    sed_pattern=$1
    shift
    for file in $(ls $@); do
      mv -v "$file" "$(sed $sed_pattern <<< $file)"
    done
  else
    echo "usage: $0 sed_pattern files..."
  fi
}

Usage

sedrename 's|\(.*\)\(-[0-9.]*\.pkg\)|\1\2|' *.pkg

before:

./Xft2-2.1.13.pkg
./jasper-1.900.1.pkg
./xorg-libXrandr-1.2.3.pkg

after:

./Xft2.pkg
./jasper.pkg
./xorg-libXrandr.pkg

Creating target folders:

Since mv doesn't automatically create target folders we can't using our initial version of sedrename.

It's a fairly small change, so it'd be nice to include that feature:

We'll need a utility function, abspath (or absolute path) since bash doesn't have this build in.

abspath () { case "$1" in
               /*)printf "%s\n" "$1";;
               *)printf "%s\n" "$PWD/$1";;
             esac; }

Once we have that we can generate the target folder(s) for a sed/rename pattern which includes new folder structure.

This will ensure we know the names of our target folders. When we rename we'll need to use it on the target file name.

# generate the rename target
target="$(sed $sed_pattern <<< $file)"

# Use absolute path of the rename target to make target folder structure
mkdir -p "$(dirname $(abspath $target))"

# finally move the file to the target name/folders
mv -v "$file" "$target"

Here's the full folder aware script...

sedrename() {
  if [ $# -gt 1 ]; then
    sed_pattern=$1
    shift
    for file in $(ls $@); do
      target="$(sed $sed_pattern <<< $file)"
      mkdir -p "$(dirname $(abspath $target))"
      mv -v "$file" "$target"
    done
  else
    echo "usage: $0 sed_pattern files..."
  fi
}

Of course, it still works when we don't have specific target folders too.

If we wanted to put all the songs into a folder, ./Beethoven/ we can do this:

Usage

sedrename 's|Beethoven - |Beethoven/|g' *.mp3

before:

./Beethoven - Fur Elise.mp3
./Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata.mp3
./Beethoven - Ode to Joy.mp3
./Beethoven - Rage Over the Lost Penny.mp3

after:

./Beethoven/Fur Elise.mp3
./Beethoven/Moonlight Sonata.mp3
./Beethoven/Ode to Joy.mp3
./Beethoven/Rage Over the Lost Penny.mp3

Bonus round...

Using this script to move files from folders into a single folder:

Assuming we wanted to gather up all the files matched, and place them in the current folder, we can do it:

sedrename 's|.*/||' **/*.mp3

before:

./Beethoven/Fur Elise.mp3
./Beethoven/Moonlight Sonata.mp3
./Beethoven/Ode to Joy.mp3
./Beethoven/Rage Over the Lost Penny.mp3

after:

./Beethoven/ # (now empty)
./Fur Elise.mp3
./Moonlight Sonata.mp3
./Ode to Joy.mp3
./Rage Over the Lost Penny.mp3

Note on sed regex patterns

Regular sed pattern rules apply in this script, these patterns aren't PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions). You could have sed extended regular expression syntax, using either sed -r or sed -E depending on your platform.

See the POSIX compliant man re_format for a complete description of sed basic and extended regexp patterns.

Answer 4

This seems to work assuming that

• everything ends with $pkg
• your version #'s always start with a "-"

strip off the .pkg, then strip off -..

for x in $(ls); do echo $x $(echo $x | sed 's/\.pkg//g' | sed 's/-.*//g').pkg; done