CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexlinuxbashfilenames
Boricode
Boricode

Reputation: 35

Simple script to clean file names

I've got the following "problem". I have a bunch of files (like thousands) named "ThisIsAFile-BLAH.txt", and I would like to clean these file names so that they're called only "ThisIsAFile.txt", removing everything after the "-" symbol including it.

What would be the best way to proceed?

Thanks in advance for your time and help.

P.S. OS is GNU/Linux. P.S. 2 I'm trying to teach myself how to automate menial tasks by writing simple scripts.

Solution:

Thanks guys. I finally got it.

rename 's/-[^-]*(?=\.\w+)$//' *.txt

Thanks again.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1046

Answers (4)

gniourf_gniourf
gniourf_gniourf

Reputation: 46843

If you don't have too many files, you can loop through your files with a glob:

for i in *-BLAH.txt; do
    mv -nv -- "$i" "${i%-BLAH.txt}.txt"
done

(note the use of -n so as to not overwrite an otherwise already existing file, the use of -v so at to be verbose (optional) and the use of -- just in case one file starts with a hyphen, so as to not confuse mv that would try to interpret it as options). Also not the quotings!

If you have lot of files, you can use find, it might be quicker than Bash's globbing:

find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*-BLAH.txt' -exec bash -c 'while(($#)); do mv -nv -- "$1" "${1%-BLAH.txt}"; shift; done' _ {} +

Here I'm using find's + operator so that the bash command is not spawned too many times. Then bash does its loop on the arguments given by find. Note the use of the dummy argument _ since launched this way, Bash will set its positional arguments starting from 0, not from 1.

The find method is really good, as you can fine tune which files will you'll apply the bash loop to. Inside the bash loop, you can then generate whatever renaming scheme you like.

Upvotes: 0

suhas
suhas

Reputation: 733

by using awk it can be written as

input file:

ThisIsAFile2-Blah.txt
ThisIsAFile3-Blah.txt
ThisIsAFile-Blah.txt

command for changing

ls *.txt|awk `s=$1` 'BEGIN{FS="-"; OFS=""} {print "mv "$s" "$1,".txt"}' |sh

output of the same would be 

 ThisIsAFile2.txt
 ThisIsAFile3.txt
 ThisIsAFile.txt

Upvotes: 0

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 785406

Let's say:

s="ThisIsAFile-BLAH.txt"

Pure BASH:

echo "${s/-*\./.}"
ThisIsAFile.txt

Using sed:

sed 's/-.*\./\./' <<< "$s"
ThisIsAFile.txt

Upvotes: 1

Paul Dixon
Paul Dixon

Reputation: 300965

Check man rename, see if supports regex. if it does, something as simple as this would do it

rename 's/-.*/.txt/' *.txt

That searches all .txt filenames for a dash, and replaces it and everything that follows with .txt

Upvotes: 1

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