Dropbox and locate

ls | perl -nl -e '/(.*)(S[0-9]+E[0-9]+).*(\.mp4)/ && print "mv \"" . $_ . "\" \"". $1 . $2 . $3 . "\""'

How does this work? First ls outputs the list of files, one per line, like so:

The.Big.Bang.Theory.S01E01.xxxxxxxx.mp4
The.Big.Bang.Theory.S01E02.somecrap.mp4
The.Big.Bang.Theory.S04E12.otherjunk.mp4

Then perl -nl splits this into lines, feeding each to the regex, much like awk*. The regex captures 3 groups (denoted by parentheses), first the bit before SxxEyy, then that, then the file suffix. It then simply assembles a mv command suitable for renaming the files, like so:

mv "The.Big.Bang.Theory.S01E01.xxxxxxxx.mp4" "The.Big.Bang.Theory.S01E01.mp4"
mv "The.Big.Bang.Theory.S01E02.somecrap.mp4" "The.Big.Bang.Theory.S01E02.mp4"
mv "The.Big.Bang.Theory.S04E12.otherjunk.mp4" "The.Big.Bang.Theory.S04E12.mp4"

This can then be inspected and once you're satisfied it does what you want, piped into a shell by appending: | sh.

*awk would normally be a good tool to use for this, but sadly only GNU awk supports regex capture groups and Mac OS X doesn't include gawk by default.

Debugging pam can be tricky.

Have you tried making a real root shell with sudo -s and running the /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb command.

Alternatively, you could try making a new admin account to be sure your admin account has correct privelages/authentication. Any odd things like server or OpenLDAP that we should know of?