How to rename these files in bulk via shell and regular expressions? - regex

I trying to modify a lot of files with names like 2020-06-28 16.19.50.md, removing the spaces and symbols, retain only the first 12 digits as 202006281619.md.
Hopefully this can be done with a shell script through Regular Expressions. Selecting these files in the macOS Finder, right-click and run the Service script to complete the changes.

I don't use Regular Expressions.
But this can remove spaces of current directory's file names.
for f in *; do mv "$f" "$(echo $f | sed 's/ //'g)" ; done

Related

Use sed/regex to rename a file - bash with macOS

I have a list of files that a date has been added to the end.
ex: Chorus Left Octave (consolidated) (2020_10_14 20_27_18 UTC). The files will end with .wav or .mp3
I want to leave the (consolidated) but take out the date. I have come up with the regex and tested with regexr.com. It does format the text correctly there.
The regex is: /(\([0-9]+(.*)(?=.wav|.mp3))+/g
Now, I am trying to actually rename the files. In my terminal I have cd'ed into the folder with the files. Based on other answers here I have tried:
rename -n '/(\([0-9]+(.*)(?=.wav|.mp3))+/g' *.wav|*.mp3 - using rename installed with homebrew
sed '/(\([0-9]+(.*))+/g' *.wav|*.mp3
for f in *.wav|*.mp3; do mv "$f" "${f/(\([0-9]+(.*)(?=.wav|.mp3))+/g}” done
The first two do not throw any errors, but do not do any renames (I know that the -n after rename just prints out the files that will be changed, it doesn't actually change the files)
The last one starts a bash session.
I'd rather use the rename or sed, seems simpler to me. But, what am I doing wrong?.
In plain bash:
#!/bin/bash
pat='([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]_[0-9][0-9]_[0-9][0-9] [0-9][0-9]_[0-9][0-9]_[0-9][0-9] UTC)'
for f in *.mp3 *.wav; do echo mv "$f" "${f/$pat}"; done
Remove the echo preceding the mv after making sure it will work as intended. You may also consider adding the -i option to the mv in order to avoid clobbering an existing file unintentionally.

rename files by removing the first 171 characters?

I have thousands files downloaded from internet with naming convention like this:
HTTP_services.cgi?FILENAME=%2Fdata%2FGPM_L3%2FGPM_3IMERGM.06%2F2020%2F3B-MO.MS.MRG.3IMERG.20200301-S000000-E235959.03.V06B.HDF5&FORMAT=bmM0Lw&BBOX=-9,114.3,-8,115.8&LABEL=3B-MO.MS.MRG.3IMERG.20200301-S000000-E235959.03.V06B.HDF5.SUB.nc4
I want to rename all the file by removing the first 171 characters in the filename. So I will have a file with name "3B-MO.MS.MRG.3IMERG.20200301-S000000-E235959.03.V06B.HDF5.SUB.nc4"
Is there any one-liner solution that I can use? I am using terminal in mac.
You may try the below regex:
.{171}
Explanation of the above regex:
. - Represents a metacharacter representing anything except a new line.
{171} - Represents a quantifier indicating any character can come 171 times.
You can find the demo of the above regex in here.
You can use the GNU rename utility in order to execute the below command to achieve your result.
rename 's/.{171}//g' *.nc4
Worth Reading: I can't run rename command on MACOS. What to do?
rename is the best solution, but you can also use substring commands:
for file in `ls *IMERG*` ; do
mv $file ${file:171}
done
or alternatively using cut:
for file in `ls *IMERG*` ; do
mv $file `echo ${file} | cut -c 171-`
done
if you sure exactly 171 characters will work for each file name.

Using xargs, eval, and mv ensemble

I've been using the command line more frequently lately to increase my proficiency. I've created a .txt file containing URLs for libraries that I'd like to download. I batch-downloaded these files using
$ cat downloads.txt | xargs wget
When using the wget command I didn't specify a destination directory. I'd like to move each of the files that I've just downloaded into a directory called "vendor".
For the record, it has occurred to me that if I ran...
$ open .
...I could drag-and-drop these files into the desired directory. But in my opinion that would defeat the purpose of this exercise.
Now that I have the files in my cwd, I'd like to be able to target them and move them into the "vendor" directory.
As a side-question: Is there a useful way to print the most recently created files to STDOUT? Currently, I can grab the filenames from the URLs within downloads.txt pretty simply using the following pipeline and Perl script...
$ cat downloads.txt | perl -n -e 'if (/(?<=\/)([-.a-z]+)$/) { print $1 . "\n" }'
This will produce...
react.js
redux.js
react-dom.js
expect.js
...which is great as these are file that I intended on targeting. I'd like to transform each of these lines into a command within a pipeline that resembles this...
$ mv {./,./vendor/}<filename>
... where <filename> is "react.js" then "redux.js", and so forth.
I figure that I may be able to accomplish this using some combination of xargs, eval, and mv. This is where my bash skills drop-off.
Just to reiterate, I'm aware that the method in which I am approaching this problem is neither simple nor ideal. This is intentionally a convoluted exercise intended to stretch my bash knowledge.
Is there anyone who knows how I can use xargs, eval, and mv to accomplish this goal?
Thank you!
xargs -l -a downloads.txt basename | xargs -i mv {} ./vendor
How this works: The first instance of xargs reads the file names from downloads.txt and calls basename for each of these file names individually (alternatively, you could use basename -a). These basenames are then piped to another instance of xargs, which uses the arguments to call mv, replacing the string {} with the current argument.
mv $(basename -a $(<downloads.txt)) ./vendor
How this works: Since you want to move all the files into the same directory, you can use a single call to mv. The command substitution ("backticks") inserts the output of the command basename -a, which, in turn, reads its arguments from the file.

Rename command with regular expression not working

I want to rename files using regex.
For example: replace pattern Mod[0-9][0-9] to Mod[0-9][0-9]_temp in files N_Mod10_m.bdf and N_Mod11_n.bdf using below command:
rename 's/\(.*Mod[0-9][0-9]\)\(.*\.bdf\)/$1_temp$2 *
but this is not working.
You need to use non-greedy pattern: (.*?). Also, add the missing quote '.
I guess, this is what you are looking for: rename 's/(.*?Mod[0-9][0-9])(.*?\.bdf)/$1_temp$2' *.
Have a look at Rename Multiple Files in a Shell Prompt and Renaming files to have lower case extensions with rename.
For CentOS, you can insert _temp into file name like this:
for i in *; do j=`echo $i | sed -r 's/(.*?Mod[0-9][0-9])(.*?\.bdf)/\1_temp\2/g'`; mv "$i" "$j"; done

Remove duplicate filename extensions

I have thousands of files named something like filename.gz.gz.gz.gz.gz.gz.gz.gz.gz.gz.gz
I am using the find command like this find . -name "*.gz*" to locate these files and either use -exec or pipe to xargs and have some magic command to clean this mess, so that I end up with filename.gz
Someone please help me come up with this magic command that would remove the unneeded instances of .gz. I had tried experimenting with sed 's/\.gz//' and sed 's/(\.gz)//' but they do not seem to work (or to be more honest, I am not very familiar with sed). I do not have to use sed by the way, any solution that would help solve this problem would be welcome :-)
one way with find and awk:
find $(pwd) -name '*.gz'|awk '{n=$0;sub(/(\.gz)+$/,".gz",n);print "mv",$0,n}'|sh
Note:
I assume there is no special chars (like spaces...) in your filename. If there were, you need quote the filename in mv command.
I added a $(pwd) to get the absolute path of found name.
you can remove the ending |sh to check generated mv ... .... cmd, if it is correct.
If everything looks good, add the |sh to execute the mv
see example here:
You may use
ls a.gz.gz.gz |sed -r 's/(\.gz)+/.gz/'
or without the regex flag
ls a.gz.gz.gz |sed 's/\(\.gz\)\+/.gz/'
ls *.gz | perl -ne '/((.*?.gz).*)/; print "mv $1 $2\n"'
It will print shell commands to rename your files, it won't execute those commands. It is safe. To execute it, you can save it to file and execute, or simply pipe to shell:
ls *.gz | ... | sh
sed is great for replacing text inside files.
You can do that with bash string substitution:
for file in *.gz.gz; do
mv "${file}" "${file%%.*}.gz"
done
This might work for you (GNU sed):
echo *.gz | sed -r 's/^([^.]*)(\.gz){2,}$/mv -v & \1\2/e'
find . -name "*.gz.gz" |
while read f; do echo mv "$f" "$(sed -r 's/(\.gz)+$/.gz/' <<<"$f")"; done
This only previews the renaming (mv) command; remove the echo to perform actual renaming.
Processes matching files in the current directory tree, as in the OP (and not just files located directly in the current directory).
Limits matching to files that end in at least 2 .gz extensions (so as not to needlessly process files that end in just one).
When determining the new name with sed, makes sure that substring .gz doesn't just match anywhere in the filename, but only as part of a contiguous sequence of .gz extensions at the end of the filename.
Handles filenames with special chars. such as embedded spaces correctly (with the exception of filenames with embedded newlines.)
Using bash string substitution:
for f in *.gz.gz; do
mv "$f" "${f%%.gz.gz*}.gz"
done
This is a slight modification of jaypal's nice answer (which would fail if any of your files had a period as part of its name, such as foo.c.gz.gz). (Mine is not perfect, either) Note the use of double-quotes, which protects against filenames with "bad" characters, such as spaces or stars.
If you wish to use find to process an entire directory tree, the variant is:
find . -name \*.gz.gz | \
while read f; do
mv "$f" "${f%%.gz.gz*}.gz"
done
And if you are fussy and need to handle filenames with embedded newlines, change the while read to while IFS= read -r -d $'\0', and add a -print0 to find; see How do I use a for-each loop to iterate over file paths output by the find utility in the shell / Bash?.
But is this renaming a good idea? How was your filename.gz.gz created? gzip has guards against accidentally doing so. If you circumvent these via something like gzip -c $1 > $1.gz, buried in some script, then renaming these files will give you grief.
Another way with rename:
find . -iname '*.gz.gz' -exec rename -n 's/(\.\w+)\1+$/$1/' {} +
When happy with the results remove -n (dry-run) option.