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rename a lot of files again

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# 8  
Old 03-31-2008
Code:
mv ./-filewithdash filewithoutdash

Generally, tools do "play nice" if you know which characters are special, and quote or escape them properly.

man sh is a good start for the ${interpolate#weird} notation.

CD rip gone wild ...? (^:
# 9  
Old 03-31-2008
Oh, and as always, ls | while read file ... is unsuitable if there are subdirectories. ls, for one, does not "play nice". for file in * is what I'd recommend. Other than that, neat script.
# 10  
Old 03-31-2008
Code:
ls *.txt | awk '{
  f = $0
  gsub("(^[0-9][0-9][0-9]|\[.*\])", "", $0)
  system("mv \""f"\" \""$0"\"")
}'

# 11  
Old 03-31-2008
Quote:
Originally Posted by ajp7701
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!!!
hmm those filename are interesting because you appear to have spaces in them. You may need to set your IFS to something other than a space to work with them.

Here's an example of a simple for looup that will do what you need to do sans the spaces.

cd /<mydirectory>
for FILE in `ls`
do
NEWFILE=`echo $FILE | cut -c 4-`
if [ ! -f $NEWFILE ]
then
mv $FILE $NEWFILE
echo "moved $FILE $NEWFILE"
else
echo "$NEWFILE already exists"
fi
done
# 12  
Old 03-31-2008
thx much!
to era, perdarabo, qkrenge:
thank you so much!! I will try these solutions! I cant say how much I appreciate this msg board! Such a blessing! This has helped me so much again that I am DEFINITELY going to donate to this board again. And continue to do so! Wish I could help out to the cause of this board as much as it has helped me!
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