here I go again...kinda hard to explain so I apologize.
I need to rename a bunch of files in a directory. I need to remove the first three characters of the filename, and then toward the end of the filename there is constant text inside of brackets. here is a demo (not for real) 'ls -1' of the dir:


001 Random name here - random title here - [constanttxt] f g- f.txt
002 another random name here - more random txt here [constanttxt] dg .txt
003 this is 3rd random name - 3rd random-title[constanttxt] d- df .txt
.
.
.
100 and and and the hundred names - hundred titles [constanttxt] s a .txt

Ok well its something like that, pretty ugly filenames! Anyway for now I just need the begining three numbers removed from each filename, and the [constanttxt] removed. They are all .txt files. Notice near the end of each filename the spacing is kinda random also, sometimes theres even random hyphens in the titles. Hope it makes sense. this is Fedora8, bash shell, and I have played around with awk and sed, but awk and sed dont seem to play nice with the bracket [] characters? Not only that but the mv and/or cp commands dont seem to play nice with spaces in the filenames thus I've really lost hope of automating this! Any pointers would help! Thank you so much!!!

I found this script that seems to be doing something remotely similar what i want to do, it is renaming a bunch of files with numbers at the front...so I can probably tweak on it a bit and get close to what desired, but still my fight is with the [] and the spacing in the filenames.....
ps, whoever wrote this good job!!

#!/bin/sh
ls |
egrep "^[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]" |
while read a
do
yahoo=`echo $a |sed 's/^[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][ .]//gi' | sed 's/^[kms]b[cs][^.]*\.//gi'`
echo $yahoo
mv "$a" "$yahoo"
done

Hi,

The filenames are not pretty, so I'd suggest to keep those files in one directory or rename them appropriately. Assuming all and only of the above files are in one directory :

Tested on Fedora 8.

Here is my solution....

thanks! that looks great. Hey perderabo even though I dont recognize the shopt -s extglob command your output looks great! thx!! one of my problems was i didnt know how to deal with the [brackets] SO THANK YOU THANK YOU THANKYOU!!!!

Perderabo's script:
Ok the script works great...but as it turns out for many of my files there is also a hyphen between the first three digit number and the name....so the mv command goes to move it to the $newname which then begins with a hyphen and gives an error 'unknown option --'
How do I deal with that one?? :-)
thx again for the help! The script was awesome with all the ##+([0-9 stuff! dang I never would have figured that out.
I need to find a good reference for all these special characters and what they mean.

Try:
mv ./"$name" ./"$newname"

./name is the same as just name so it should work, but I haven't tried it.