Batch Rename Files Using Bash

Question

How does Bash rename a series of packages to remove their version numbers? I circumvented using expr and %% , but 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

You can use the bash extension function

 for i in *.pkg ; do mv "$i" "${i/-[0-9.]*.pkg/.pkg}" ; done 

Quotes are required for file names with spaces.

Answer 2

If all files are in the same directory, the sequence

 ls | sed -n 's/\(.*\)\(-[0-9.]*\.pkg\)/mv "\1\2" "\1.pkg"/p' | sh 

will do your job. The sed command will create a sequence of mv commands that you can then pass to the shell. Best to start a pipeline without training | sh to make sure that the command does what you want.

For reprocessing across multiple directories, use something like

 find . -type f | sed -n 's/\(.*\)\(-[0-9.]*\.pkg\)/mv "\1\2" "\1.pkg"/p' | sh 

Answer 3

I will do something like this:

 for file in *.pkg ; do mv $file $(echo $file | rev | cut -f2- -d- | rev).pkg done 

it is assumed that your entire file is in the current directory. If not, try using find as described above by Javier.

EDIT . In addition, this version does not use any bash-specific functions, as above, which leads to greater portability.

Answer 4

it is better to 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 

calculating a regular expression remains as an exercise (as it does with file names that include spaces)

Answer 5

This seems to work, assuming that

• it all ends in $ pkg
• Your version # always starts with "-"

cancel .pkg, then separate - ..

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

Answer 6

I had several *.txt files that were renamed to .sql in the same folder. below worked for me:

 for i in \`ls *.txt | awk -F "." '{print $1}'\` ;do mv $i.txt $i.sql; done 

Answer 7

Thanks for answers. I also had some kind of problem. Moving .nzb.queued files to .nzb files. There were spaces and other cracks in the file names, 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 regular expression creates one group for the entire file name and one group for the part before .nzb.queued, and then creates a shell move command. With quoted strings. It also avoids creating a loop in the shell script, as sed has already done so.