Rename file in Mac OS Terminal using Regex

Question

Hundreds of images need to be renamed with a terminal command using regex on MacOS 10.9 Mavericks.

The files are named this way:

0045AW489R3T(IPCAM)_0_20131124101245_931.jpg
0021DF025C8E(IPCAM)_0_20131127101721_44591.jpg
389223GT4Z6W(IPCAM)_0_20131128103423_7893282.jpg

They need to be renamed to this:

2013-11-24  10-12-45.jpg
2013-11-27  10-17-21.jpg
2013-11-28  10-34-23.jpg

Can anyone please show me how to do it?

Answer 1

You can try

for a in *.jpg ; do mv -- "$a" "${a:22:4}-${a:26:2}-${a:28:2} ${a:30:2}-${a:32:2}-${a:34:2}.jpg" ; done

A bit ugly, but it should get the job done. Like always, make sure to test on a copy before.

Answer 2

If the first part of the filenames don't always have the same length, you can use awk to extract the string after the second _ and use the first 8 digits to construct your filename:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

for file in folder/*; do
    outName=$(awk -F"_" '{ print substr($3,1,4)"-"substr($3,5,2)"-"substr($3,7,2) }' <<< "${file}").jpg
    mv "${file}" "${outName}"
done