I want to rename a bunch of files using bash, transforming this file pattern:
prefix - name - suffix.txt Into this one:
name.txt For that I wrote the following script:
find . -name "*.txt" | while read f do mv "${f}" "${f/prefix - /}" done find . -name "*.txt" | while read f do mv "${f}" "${f/ - suffix/}" done It works, but I'd like to perform the renaming using a single loop. Is it possible?
Another approach, for fun, using regular expressions:
regex='prefix - (.*) - suffix.txt' for f in *.txt; do [[ $f =~ $regex ]] && mv "$f" "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}.txt" done Actually, using the simple pattern '*.txt' here has two problems:
Using find complicates the procedure, but is more correct:
find . -maxdepth 1 -regex 'prefix - .* - suffix.txt' -print0 | \ while read -d '' -r; do [[ $REPLY =~ $regex ]] && mv "$REPLY" "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}.txt" done 
"${BASH_REMATCH[1]}.txt". Please fix it and I'll accept this answerIf you have access to GNU sed, you could use some regex to perform something like:
for i in *.txt; do mv "$i" "$(echo $i | sed -r 's/([^-]*)\s-\s(.*)\s-\s([^-]*)\.txt/\2.txt/')"; done you could use this:
find . -name "*.txt" -print0 | awk -v RS="\0" -v ORS="\0" '{print $0;sub(/^prefix - /,""); sub(/ - suffix.txt$/,".txt"); print $0; }' | xargs -0 -n 2 mv which could be written more clearly as:
find . -name "*.txt" -print0 | awk -v RS="\0" -v ORS="\0" '{ print $0; sub(/^prefix - /,""); sub(/ - suffix.txt$/,".txt"); print $0; }' | xargs -0 -n 2 mv If you have emacs installed. You can use the dired feature.
bash:# open your dir with emacs emacs /path/to/your/dir emacs:\.txt$Enter to mark all txt files..*- \(.*\) -.*Enter\1.txtEnter to rename.
renameinstalled, try this: stackoverflow.com/questions/11990893/…renameinstalled by default