Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi there,

I've got a set of files that are named as follows:

image_N1_8letters.jpg
image_N2_8letters.jpg
...
image_N10_8letters.jpg
image_N11_8letters.jpg
....
image_N100_8letters.jpg
image_N101_8letters.jpg

with the "8letters" bit always consisting of 8 but always different letters. I need to rename all these files keeping the filenames as they are except that I need the "_N*_" bit as follows:

"_N001_"; "_N002_"; ...; "_N010_"; "_N011_"; .. ; "_N100_"; "_N101_"; ...

NB that a ls on my directory results in the files being listed as:

image_N100_8letters.jpg
image_N101_8letters.jpg
image_N10_8letters.jpg
...

so the files aren't listed in the correct order.

Can anyone help and give me some advice on how to write a shell script to solve that problem.

Thanks very much, your help is much appreciated.

kjartan

Try:

Code:

for i in image_*; do mv $i `echo $i | perl -ne '/(image_N)(\d+)(.*)/;printf("%s%03d%s",$1,$2,$3)'`; done

Thank you very much! It worked perfectly. Would you mind explaining it in a bit more detail (sorry but I'd like to understand it properly)?

Code:

awk -F"_" '{
printf("%s_%s%03s_%s\n",$1,substr($2,1,1),substr($2,2),$3)
}' b