Renaming thousand files with similar names

Question

I'm creating a bash script to rename my files. The files are in the same folder and all look something like this

1xxx_(bunch of characters)=(bunch of characters)=1234567890

Now what i want is to leave just the last 1234567890. Basically deleting every character from the front to the second occurrence of =

Answer 1

You can use the shell's parameter expansion feature: in particular

${parameter#word}
${parameter##word}
       Remove matching prefix pattern.  The word is expanded to produce
       a pattern just as in pathname expansion.  If the pattern matches
       the  beginning of the value of parameter, then the result of the
       expansion is the expanded value of parameter with  the  shortest
       matching  pattern  (the ``#'' case) or the longest matching pat‐
       tern (the ``##'' case) deleted.

So something like

for file in *; do echo mv -- "$file" "${file##*=}"; done

(remove the echo if it appears to do the right thing).

---

One issue you may face is that filenames may become non-unique once the prefixes are removed. You can either choose to skip renaming these cases using the -n or --no-clobber option to mv:

for file in *; do mv --no-clobber -- "$file" "${file##*=}"; done

or use the -b or --backup option to create distinct backups: most straightforwardly

for file in *; do mv --backup=numbered -- "$file" "${file##*=}"; done

which will add distinguishing suffixes .~1~, .~2~ and so on.

Answer 2

The perl rename script (comes standard in debian/ubuntu, or available here: http://tips.webdesign10.com/files/rename.pl.txt ) will rename files based on a regular expression. with -n it will just print the named files without actually renaming them, allowing you to test before performing the action:

# Check before renaming...
$ rename -n 's/^.*=//' *
1xxx_DSAFDSAFDSFA=FDAFDSAFDSAFSDA=12341243142 renamed as 12341243142

# now rename all files
$ rename 's/^.*=//' *

It is very flexible tool, as it can easily operate on files based on wildcards (e.g. * for all files or *.txt for all text files), and it accepts any perl regular expression.

Answer 3

awk can save the day here too. I'm using cp there, change it to mv if you like:

ls | awk -F"=" '{system("cp -i "$0" "$3)}'

I would use -i as a cp parameter too, just to be safe.