CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashrename
tso
tso

Reputation: 307

Batch rename files based on a common pattern

I have many files and all of them have the word text in them.

like test text22 test.mp3

"test" can include all kinds of characters -> -/()(&%0-9...

Now I want to rename every file so that a underscore is added before every "text" like test_test22 test.mp4. Is there a straight forward way to do this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 173

Answers (3)

James Brown
James Brown

Reputation: 37404

I assume you don't want to add the underscore but replace leading space with it like in your example (but then again it had mp3 -> mp4 so just making sure):

$ ls
test text22 test.mp3
text22 test.mp3
$ for f in *text*; do "echo ${f/ text/_text}" ; done
test_text22 test.mp3
text22 test.mp3

To mv replace the echo with mv "$f" "${f/ text/_text}"

Upvotes: 0

Fred
Fred

Reputation: 6995

Another way to do it which illustrates the (often very useful) use of regular expression matching in Bash.

#!/bin/bash
for file in *
do
  if [[ $file =~ (.*)text(.*) ]] ; then
    mv "$file" "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}text_${BASH_REMATCH[2]}"
  fi
done

This would be especially useful if you want to do something other than just rename the files.

Upvotes: 0

Cyrus
Cyrus

Reputation: 88601

With Perl‘s standalone rename command:

rename -n 's/ (text[0-9]{1,2})/_$1/' *text*

If everything looks okay, remove option -n.

Upvotes: 1

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