Renaming files with Bash, removing prefix and suffix

by

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:

  1. It’s too broad; you may need to apply the regex to a lot of non-matching files.
  2. If there are a lot of files in the current directory, the command line could overflow.

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

More Related Contents:

  1. Batch renaming files with Bash
  2. Using sed to mass rename files
  3. How to Batch Rename Files in a macOS Terminal?
  4. What does 2>&1 mean here?
  5. Input data to a shell script [closed]
  6. Why would a correct shell script give a wrapped/truncated/corrupted error message? [duplicate]
  7. When do we need curly braces around shell variables?
  8. Bash command line and input limit
  9. Replace one substring for another string in shell script
  10. How to find the difference in days between two dates?
  11. How to assign the output of a Bash command to a variable? [duplicate]
  12. Running script upon login in mac OS X [closed]
  13. How to append output to the end of a text file
  14. Command substitution: backticks or dollar sign / paren enclosed? [duplicate]
  15. Why start a shell command with a backslash?
  16. How to process each output line in a loop?
  17. Set a parent shell’s variable from a subshell
  18. Value too great for base (error token is “08”) [duplicate]
  19. What expands to all files in current directory recursively?
  20. find: missing argument to -exec
  21. What does it mean in shell when we put a command inside dollar sign and parentheses: $(command)
  22. Looping through all files in a directory [duplicate]
  23. How does bash tab completion work?
  24. Connect to sqlplus in a shell script and run SQL scripts
  25. Convert seconds to hours, minutes, seconds
  26. Is there an elegant way to store and evaluate return values in bash scripts?
  27. Using groovy, how do you pipe multiple shell commands?
  28. Parse HTML using shell
  29. docker entrypoint running bash script gets “permission denied”
  30. What does `kill -0 $pid` in a shell script do?

Leave a Comment