Hi. I have a large number of files with names like:

t_ 0.20000E-02.dat

There is actually a space after the underscore. These files are numbered numerically, i.e. t_ 0.20000E-02.dat, t_ 0.21000E-02.dat, t_ 0.22000E-02.dat and so on.

What I would like to do is rename such that the file with the lowest numerical value becomes t1.dat, and the one next to it becomes t2.dat and so on.

I think what I have to do is find the number of files in the directory and sort them according to their numerical value. Then I have to do a loop over them to rename them accordingly. But this seems to be quite involved to me. Any ideas?

Thanks!

$ ls -1 | sort -k 1.4 | while read a; do i=$((i+1));echo mv "$a" t${i}.dat; done
mv t_ 0.20000E-02.dat t1.dat
mv t_ 0.21000E-02.dat t2.dat
mv t_ 0.22000E-02.dat t3.dat

Thanks for the reply. The problem I have is I also have files such as t_ 0.10000E-03.dat, t_ 0.20000E-03.dat etc, which are not sorted properly, so I get the following:

mv t_  0.0000    .dat t1.dat
mv t_ 0.10000E-02.dat t2.dat
mv t_ 0.10000E-03.dat t3.dat
mv t_ 0.11000E-02.dat t4.dat
mv t_ 0.12000E-02.dat t5.dat

try this: This will remove all the spaces and replace it with an underscore and then rename them

ls -1 "t_ "* | while read filename ; do flnm=`echo "$filename"  | tr -s " " "_"`; cp "$filename" $flnm; done

i=0;for file in `ls -1 t_*`; do i=$((i+1)); mv "$filen" t${i}.dat; done

That is a useless use of ls * and useless use of backticks. You do not need ls to use *, that's the shell's job. You're only getting the list of files out of ls when you use * because you're cramming the list of files into ls in the first place.

Furthermore, you don't need to cram everything on one line. ; can be replaced by a new line for better readability in nearly all cases.

i=1

for FILE in "t_ "*
do
        echo mv "$FILE" t${i}.dat
        let i=i+1
done

Hi, I'm afraid the codes are still doing this:

mv t_0.0000_.dat t1.dat
mv t_0.10000E-02.dat t2.dat
mv t_0.10000E-03.dat t3.dat

mv t_0.0000_.dat t1.dat
mv t_0.10000E-03.dat t2.dat
mv t_0.20000E-03.dat t3.dat

Well, the way they're sorted, they don't really sort numerically. No sort command I can think of is going to grok floating point numbers in exponential notation.

So the usual trick is to rename them into something that will sort.

Are there any positive exponents or only negative ones? Any negative numbers or only positive ones? What do they look like?