We can assume sed
is available on any *nix, but we can't be sure
it'll support sed -n
to generate mv commands. (NOTE: Only GNU sed
does this.)
Even so, bash builtins and sed, we can quickly whip up a shell function to do this.
sedrename() {
if [ $# -gt 1 ]; then
sed_pattern=$1
shift
for file in $(ls $@); do
mv -v "$file" "$(sed $sed_pattern <<< $file)"
done
else
echo "usage: $0 sed_pattern files..."
fi
}
Usage
sedrename 's|\(.*\)\(-[0-9.]*\.pkg\)|\1\2|' *.pkg
before:
./Xft2-2.1.13.pkg
./jasper-1.900.1.pkg
./xorg-libXrandr-1.2.3.pkg
after:
./Xft2.pkg
./jasper.pkg
./xorg-libXrandr.pkg
Creating target folders:
Since mv
doesn't automatically create target folders we can't using
our initial version of sedrename
.
It's a fairly small change, so it'd be nice to include that feature:
We'll need a utility function, abspath
(or absolute path) since bash
doesn't have this build in.
abspath () { case "$1" in
/*)printf "%s\n" "$1";;
*)printf "%s\n" "$PWD/$1";;
esac; }
Once we have that we can generate the target folder(s) for a
sed/rename pattern which includes new folder structure.
This will ensure we know the names of our target folders. When we
rename we'll need to use it on the target file name.
# generate the rename target
target="$(sed $sed_pattern <<< $file)"
# Use absolute path of the rename target to make target folder structure
mkdir -p "$(dirname $(abspath $target))"
# finally move the file to the target name/folders
mv -v "$file" "$target"
Here's the full folder aware script...
sedrename() {
if [ $# -gt 1 ]; then
sed_pattern=$1
shift
for file in $(ls $@); do
target="$(sed $sed_pattern <<< $file)"
mkdir -p "$(dirname $(abspath $target))"
mv -v "$file" "$target"
done
else
echo "usage: $0 sed_pattern files..."
fi
}
Of course, it still works when we don't have specific target folders
too.
If we wanted to put all the songs into a folder, ./Beethoven/
we can do this:
Usage
sedrename 's|Beethoven - |Beethoven/|g' *.mp3
before:
./Beethoven - Fur Elise.mp3
./Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata.mp3
./Beethoven - Ode to Joy.mp3
./Beethoven - Rage Over the Lost Penny.mp3
after:
./Beethoven/Fur Elise.mp3
./Beethoven/Moonlight Sonata.mp3
./Beethoven/Ode to Joy.mp3
./Beethoven/Rage Over the Lost Penny.mp3
Bonus round...
Using this script to move files from folders into a single folder:
Assuming we wanted to gather up all the files matched, and place them
in the current folder, we can do it:
sedrename 's|.*/||' **/*.mp3
before:
./Beethoven/Fur Elise.mp3
./Beethoven/Moonlight Sonata.mp3
./Beethoven/Ode to Joy.mp3
./Beethoven/Rage Over the Lost Penny.mp3
after:
./Beethoven/ # (now empty)
./Fur Elise.mp3
./Moonlight Sonata.mp3
./Ode to Joy.mp3
./Rage Over the Lost Penny.mp3
Note on sed regex patterns
Regular sed pattern rules apply in this script, these patterns aren't
PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions). You could have sed
extended regular expression syntax, using either sed -r
or sed -E
depending on your platform.
See the POSIX compliant man re_format
for a complete description of
sed basic and extended regexp patterns.