Rename a bunch of files in debian - regex

I have thousands of files that I need to rename with the following format.
2008:09:18:17:45:48-alfanumeric-alfanumeric.wav the first part is a date.
Ex. 2008:09:18:17:45:48-703-s.wav
A want to rename it to:
20080918.174548.703.s.wav
Basically to remove the ':' and to make a more human readable format and easier to split.
I know that rename is what im looking for but the regex is not working. I'm typing:
rename
's/(\d):(\d):(\d):(\d):(\d):(\d)-(.?)-(.?).wav/$1$2$3.$4$5$6.$7.$8.wav/'
./*

rename 's/(\d+):(\d+):(\d+):(\d+):(\d+):(\d+)-([^-]+)-([^.]+).wav/$1$2$3.$4$5$6.$7.$8.wav/' ./*
should be used - in your version you always only match one digit. Plus, no need to escape the :.

You need to consider multiplicities:
rename 's/(\d+)\:(\d+)\:(\d+)\:(\d+)\:(\d+)\:(\d+)-(.*)-(.?).wav/$1$2$3.$4$5$6.$7.$8.wav/' ./*

If this is something you're only going to do once, I'd do it this way:
1) ls the files into a new file: ls datadir > mytmp
2) edit the mytmp with your favorite editor.
2a delete any lines that aren't data files you care about, like "." and ".."
2b edit each line into a shell command to rename the file. I like emacs, and
would build a keyboard macro to: clip the file name, insert "mv ", insert the
filename, insert space, insert the filename again, edit the inserted filename into
the desired format.
2c save
3) run sh < mytmp
Done! Not elegant, tedious if your editor doesn't support macros or similar functionality, but guaranteed to work and git-er-done.

Related

Rename multiple files with different names to same name and different numbers

I have multiple pictures of trucks with random messy names and different formats (jpeg, jpg, png etc.) and I want to rename them to "truck1.jpeg", "truck2.jpg", "truck3.png" and so on. How do I do it using the rename command?
It's probably easier to use bash and mv, since AFAIK you need something like bash to generate the number sequence. In bash
i=1
for x in *; do
echo $x '->' truck$i.${x##*.}
mv "$x" truck$i.${x##*.} && i=$((i+1))
done
The for x in * operates on all files whose names do not begin with a dot and are in the current directory. You can adjust the glob to be more exclusive, but this script will need modification if the files are in other directories. Again, probably easier to collect the files in one directory, or maybe put it in a script file and execute it in multiple directories using find ... -exec.
This uses i as a counter to generate the digits. The trick is the ${x##*.} expression which takes the file name and deletes everything up to the final dot. This allows you to preserve and reattach the file extension to the new name. You have to be careful to set i correctly or you will overwrite old truck1 files with new ones.

Mass rename in shell script

I have a bunch of files which are of this format:
blabla.log.YYYY.MM.DD
Where YYYY.MM.DD is something like (2016.01.18)
I have quite a few folders with about 1000 files in each, so I wanted to have a simple script to rename them. I want to rename them to
blabla.log
So basically, I'm just stripping the date at the end. Here is what I have:
for f in [a-zA-Z]*.log.[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9]; do
mv -v $f ${f#[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9]};
done
This script outputs this:
mv: `blabla.log.2016.01.18' and `blabla.log.2016.01.18' are the same file
For more information:
I'm on windows, but I run this script in gitbash
For some reason, my gitbash doesn't recognize the "rename" command
Some regex patterns (like [0-9]{4} don't seem to work)
I'm really at a lost. Thanks.
EDIT: I need to rename every single file that has a date at the end and that is of the from: *.log.2016.01.18. They all need to keep their original names. All that should change is the removal of the date.
You have to use % instead of #: you want to remove from the end, not the start of your string.
Also, you're missing a . in what has to be removed, you don't want to end up with blabla.log..
Quoting the variable names prevents surprises when file names contain special characters.
Together:
mv -v "$f" "${f%.[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9]}"

bulk file renaming in bash, to remove name with spaces, leaving trailing digits

Can a bash/shell expert help me in this? Each time I use PDF to split large pdf file (say its name is X.pdf) into separate pages, where each page is one pdf file, it creates files with this pattern
"X 1.pdf"
"X 2.pdf"
"X 3.pdf" etc...
The file name "X" above is the original file name, which can be anything. It then adds one space after the name, then the page number. Page numbers always start from 1 and up to how many pages. There is no option in adobe PDF to change this.
I need to run a shell command to simply remove/strip out all the "X " part, and just leave the digits, like this
1.pdf
2.pdf
3.pdf
....
100.pdf ...etc..
Not being good in pattern matching, not sure what regular expression I need.
I know I need something like
for i in *.pdf; do mv "$i$" ........; done
And it is the ....... part I do not know how to do.
This only needs to run on Linux/Unix system.
Use sed..
for i in *.pdf; do mv "$i" $(sed 's/.*[[:blank:]]//' <<< "$i"); done
And it would be simple through rename
rename 's/.*\s//' *.pdf
You can remove everything up to (including) the last space in the variable with this:
${i##* }
That's "star space" after the double hash, meaning "anything followed by space". ${i#* } would remove up to the first space.
So run this to check:
for i in *.pdf; do echo mv -i -- "$i" "${i##* }" ; done
and remove the echo if it looks good. The -i suggested by Gordon Davisson will prompt you before overwriting, and -- signifies end of options, which prevents things from blowing up if you ever have filenames starting with -.
If you just want to do bulk renaming of files (or directories) and don't mind using external tools, then here's mine: rnm
The command to do what you want would be:
rnm -rs '/.*\s//' *.pdf
.*\s selects the part before (and with) the last white space and replaces it with empty string.
Note:
It doesn't overwrite any existing files (throws warning if it finds an existing file with the target name).
And this operation is failsafe. You can get back the changes made by last rnm command with rnm -u.
Here's a list of documents for rnm.

Can Notepad++ save out search results to a text file?

I need to do quite a few regular expression search/replaces throughout hundreds and hundreds of static files. I'm looking to build an audit trail so I at least know what files were touched by what searches/replaces.
I can do my regular expression searches in Notepad++ and it gives me file names/paths and number of hits in each file. It also gives me the line #s which I don't really care that much about.
What I really want is a separate text file of the file names/paths. The # of hits in each file would be a nice addition, but really it's just a list of file names/paths that I'm after.
In Notepad++'s search results pane, I can do a right click and copy, but that includes all the line #s and code which is just too much noise, especially when you're getting hundreds of matches.
Anyone know how I can get these results to just the file name/paths? I'm after something like:
/about/foo.html
/about/bar.html
/faq/2012/awesome.html
/faq/2013/awesomer.html
/foo/bar/baz/wee.html
etc.
Then I can name that file regex_whatever_search.txt and at the top of it include the regex used for the search and replace. Below that, I've got my list of files it touched.
UPDATE What looks like the easiest thing to do (at least that I've found) is to just copy all the search results into a new text file and run the following regex:
^\tLine.+$
And replace that with an empty string. That'll give you just the file path and hit counts with a lot of empty space between each entry. Then run the following regex:
\s+\n
And replace with:
\n
That'll strip out all the unwanted empty space and you'll be left with a nice list.
maybe you need power of unix tools
assume you have GNUWin32 installed in c:\tools\gnuwin32
than if you have replace.bat file with that content:
#echo off
set BIN=c:\tools\gnuwin32\bin
set WHAT=%1
set TOWHAT=%2
set MASK=%3
rem Removing quotes
SET WHAT=###%WHAT%###
SET WHAT=%WHAT:"###=%
SET WHAT=%WHAT:###"=%
SET WHAT=%WHAT:###=%
SET TOWHAT=###%TOWHAT%###
SET TOWHAT=%TOWHAT:"###=%
SET TOWHAT=%TOWHAT:###"=%
SET TOWHAT=%TOWHAT:###=%
SET MASK=###%MASK%###
SET MASK=%MASK:"###=%
SET MASK=%MASK:###"=%
SET MASK=%MASK:###=%
echo %WHAT% replaces to %TOWHAT%
rem printing matching files
%BIN%\grep -r -c "%WHAT%" %MASK%
rem actual replace
%BIN%\find %MASK% -type f -exec %BIN%\sed -i "s/%WHAT%/%TOWHAT%/g" {} +
you can do regex replace in masked files recursively with output you required
replace "using System.Windows" "using Nothing" *.cs
The regulat expression I use for this kind of problem is
^\tLine.[0-9]*:.
And it works for me
This works well if you have Excel available and want to avoid using regular expressions:
Ctrl+A to select all the results
drag & drop the selected results to Excel
Create a Filter on the 1st row
Filter out the lines that have "(Blank)" on the 1st column
Select the remaining lines (i.e. the lines with the filenames) and copy/paste them to another sheet or any wanted destination
You could also Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C the search results, then use the Paste Option "Use Text Import Wizard" in Excel, say that the data is "Fixed width" and put one single break line after the 2nd character (to remove the two leading spaces in the filename during import), and use a filter to filter out the unwanted rows.

Rename a bunch of folders

I have a bunch of folders in the same directory
2012-12-06 Camcorder_5th_Jan_2013
2012-12-07 Camcorder_5th_Jan_2013
2012-12-16 Camcorder_5th_Jan_2013
...
I wish to drop the Camcorder_5th_Jan_2013 part and for them to look like:
2012-12-06
2012-12-07
2012-12-16
...
I was thinking something like
> mv (*).Camcorder* 1
i.e. capture everything before Camcorder and put into group 1 and rename to this group.
But I am struggling.
Any tips?
Thanks
replace match \s.+ with empty string
I suggest using rename, I am currently not in front of my Linux machine but hopefully these two links can get you somewhere:
Howto: Linux Rename Multiple Files At a Shell Prompt
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/renaming-multiple-files-at-a-shell-prompt.html
linux batch rename directories and strip # character from name
Update:
If you have access to Gnome or the X-Environment maybe you could try something like this if the Bash syntax is giving you a headache.
Métamorphose : A File -n- Folder Renamer:
http://file-folder-ren.sourceforge.net