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I've a series of media files I'm trying to rename en mass.

001 - 01x01 - mediaTitle1.avi
002 - 01x02 - mediaTitle2.avi
003 - 01x03 - mediaTitle3.avi

What I'd like is to output:

Series Title S01 E01 - mediaTitle1.avi
Series Title S01 E02 - mediaTitle2.avi
Series Title S01 E03 - mediaTitle3.avi

I'm trying this:

for f in *01x*; do echo mv -v "$f" "Series Title S01 E{f#1}"; done

But it's failing. So I want to keep the end of the file and replace the beginning for each file

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  • You can use the rename command. Filenames have spaces?
    – Sreeraj
    Jan 22, 2015 at 15:56

2 Answers 2

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You are close, but forgot(?) to put $ at variable expansion, try:

for f in  *01x*; do mv -v -- "$f" 'Series Title S01 E'"${f#*01x}"; done

Notice single quotes in target file due to spaces in filename.

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  • Holy moly... It worked.. but I had to remove: "-v --" Not sure why...
    – Beertastic
    Jan 22, 2015 at 16:05
  • @Beertastic -v is just verbose flag, and -- informs mv that it is the end of options and all next arguments will be filenames. This allow to pass files with - in their names, e.g. -abc.txt. It really should work with both those flags.
    – jimmij
    Jan 22, 2015 at 16:08
  • @jimmij Neither -v nor -- are specified by POSIX, so it's possible Beertastic is on a platform that doesn't support them (e.g. Busybox, Solaris).
    – James Sneeringer
    Jan 22, 2015 at 18:04
  • Isn't -- part of a general POSIX specification for all commands that do normal option processing? Probably it's just -v that had to be removed.
    – Barmar
    Jan 22, 2015 at 20:19
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cd /path/to/avidir; mkdir ../avidir2
pax -rwls '|.* - \(..\)x\(.. - \)|Series Title S\1 E\2|' *.avi ../avidir2

The above command will create hard-links to all of your files in another directory. This enables you to verify all of the changes are to your satisfaction before removing the files with the unwanted names.

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