CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bash
resolveaswontfix
resolveaswontfix

Reputation: 1175

How do I Remove Specific Characters From File Names Using BASH

I have a lot of files that have a shared pattern in their name that I would like to remove. For example I have the files, "a_file000.tga" and "another_file000.tga". I would like to do an operation on those files that would remove the pattern "000" from their names resulting in the new names, "a_file.tga" and "another_file.tga".

Upvotes: 70

Views: 94666

Answers (5)

DigitalRoss
DigitalRoss

Reputation: 146043

Piping the output of ls is widely considered to be very dangerous because it's not predictable or portable, but if you are willing to take the risk:

#!/bin/bash
ls | while read name; do
  echo mv $name ${name/$1//}
done

Upvotes: 3

Dhruv Pal
Dhruv Pal

Reputation: 957

Use rename, maybe you need to install it on linux, Its python script

rename (option) 's/oldname/newname' ...

so you can use it like

rename -v 's/000//' *.tga

that means we are instructing to replace all files with .tga extension in that folder to replace 000 with empty space. Hope that works

You can check this link for more info and here

Upvotes: 4

mouviciel
mouviciel

Reputation: 67829

Try this (this works in plain old Bourne sh as well):

for i in *000.tga
do
    mv "$i" "`echo $i | sed 's/000//'`"
done

Both arguments are wrapped in quotes to support spaces in the filenames.

Upvotes: 86

Cascabel
Cascabel

Reputation: 496902

A non-bash solution, since I know two speedy posters have already covered that:

There's an excellent short perl program called rename which is installed by default on some systems (others have a less useful rename program). It lets you use perl regex for your renaming, e.g:

rename 's/000//' *000*.tga

Upvotes: 15

Dennis Williamson
Dennis Williamson

Reputation: 360055

Bash can do sed-like substitutions:

for file in *; do mv "${file}" "${file/000/}"; done

Upvotes: 112

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