Renaming files in linux with a regex

Question

I had a group of files that I'd like to consistently rename, the files are named things like

"System-Log-01-01-2009-NODATA.txt"
"Something-Log-01-01-2009-NODATA.txt"

And I wanted them as lowercase, yyyymmdd, .log extension

"system.20090101.log"
"something.20090101.log"

score 16 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 25 '19 at 04:04

16

I used to write perl scripts to do this, until I discovered the rename command.

It accepts a perl regex to do the rename:

for this, I just typed two commands:

rename 's/(\w+)-(\w+)-(\d\d)-(\d{4})-NODATA.txt\$1.$4$3$2.log$//' *
rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *.log

For some distros though, rename doesn't have this functionality (see its man page), and you may have to install perl-rename or prename.

edited Apr 25 '19 at 04:04

gombosg

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answered May 07 '09 at 09:21

Osama ALASSIRY

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very nice answer – Judioo May 07 '09 at 10:11
8

Beware, some distros ship a worthless rename command. Check which one your distro has first. – derobert May 07 '09 at 16:24
I knew `mmv` but eventually thanks to `rename` I can use the power of regex – Ludovic Kuty Jan 13 '14 at 10:49
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On Arch Linux this is `perl-rename`. – Oleh Prypin Nov 27 '14 at 11:48

Hamish Downer · Answer 2 · 2020-05-21T09:19:09.947

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mmv is a standard linux utility to move/rename multiple files. It is available from the repos for most distributions. For your example above, you could do:

mmv '*-Log-*-*-*-NODATA.txt' '#l1.#4#3#2.log'

For more information, read this debaday article or the man page.

edited May 21 '20 at 09:19

answered May 07 '09 at 12:20

Hamish Downer

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This is awesome. Thanks. I had to add single quotes otherwise mmv wound do nothing. – Gabriel May 20 '20 at 16:02

score 6 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 31 '11 at 15:22

6

Since i don't have a rename command, i am relying on this:

for myfile in /my/folder/*; do
    target=$(echo $myfile|sed -e 's/foo/bar/g')
    mv "$myfile" "$target"
done

answered Oct 31 '11 at 15:22

Franz Bettag

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score 5 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 12 '09 at 18:09

rename util is not very "standard". Each distro ships with a different rename tool. For instance, here on Gentoo, rename is from sys-apps/util-linux package and does not support regex.

Hamish Downer suggested mmv, it seems useful, specially for use inside scripts.

On the other hand, for the general case, you might want renameutils. It has qmv and qcp commands, which will open a text editor of your choice (my preference: Vim) and allow you to edit the destination filenames there. After saving and closing the editor, qmv/qcp will do all the renaming.

Both mmv and qmv are smart enough to rename files in correct order and also to detect circular renames, and will automatically make a temporary file if needed.

On Gentoo you can also emerge the `sys-apps/rename` package, which gives you `renamexm` which will do regex renaming as well as mass upper/lowercase and other nice things. — radicand, Jun 12 '13 at 04:21

fpba · Answer 5 · 2011-10-31T14:25:38.470

To be fair:

rename 's/(\w+)-(\w+)-(\d\d)-(\d{4})-NODATA.txt\$1.$4$3$2.log$//' *.txt

gives this output:

Use of uninitialized value $4 in regexp compilation at (eval 1) line 1.
Use of uninitialized value $3 in regexp compilation at (eval 1) line 1.
Use of uninitialized value $2 in regexp compilation at (eval 1) line 1.

But:

rename -n 's/(\w+)-\w+-(\d{2})-(\d{2})-(\d{4})-NODATA\.txt$/$1.$4$3$2\.log/' *.txt && rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' System.20090101.log

gives the right output:

System-Log-01-01-2009-NODATA.txt renamed as System.20090101.log
System.20090101.log renamed as system.20090101.log

replacing {-n} switch with {-v}

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Jul 28 '15 at 16:08

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I created a small bash script to do this:

#!/bin/bash

for f in `ls /path/to/folder`; do
  # Create new filename from the old one
  # This example replaces A (upper case) with a (lower case)
  new_file=`echo "$new_file" | tr A a`

  # Rename the file
  mv "$f" "$new_file"
done

answered Jul 28 '15 at 16:08

bjarkig82

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In general parsing `ls` output is not the best idea. A random search pulled up this longish read on [Unix . SE](http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/128985/why-not-parse-ls) for your amusement. | In addition your answer would better match the question with a `tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'` – HBruijn Jul 28 '15 at 19:07

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Mar 01 '21 at 22:39

I have stumbled upon a python command-line tool called regex-rename, to install it, just run:

pip3 install --user regex-rename

To test your regex:

regex-rename '(\w+)-(\w+)-(\d+)-(\d+)-(\d+)-NODATA(\.txt)'

The actual renaming would be:

regex-rename '(\w+)-(\w+)-(\d+)-(\d+)-(\d+)-NODATA(\.txt)' '\1.\5\4\3\6' --rename

Renaming files in linux with a regex

7 Answers7