Renaming files with Bash, removing prefix and suffix

Question

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?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

If 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

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

If you have emacs installed. You can use the dired feature.

In bash:

# open your dir with emacs
emacs /path/to/your/dir

In emacs:

• Press *%Enter\.txt$Enter to mark all txt files.
• Press %rEnter.*- \(.*\) -.*Enter\1.txtEnter to rename.