Terminal – Quick Way to Rename Files with Special Structure

I've not tested this on a huge hierarchy of nested folders, but assuming you use List view, giving you the opportunity to Opt/click the reveal arrow & then select all -

The Finder since Yosemite has a built-in Search & Replace for file names.

Right click, Rename [n] items…

I just tested on some recipe text files I intentionally added accented letters to, but it ought to work on any file…

It does mean you'd have to go through each replacement, one at a time, á é í ó ú etc but it would get there in the end.

TextWrangler could do the same for the m3u file.

Make a backup of the files first!

Then open Terminal (, start a bash shell if you are not using the default shell) and run

cd ~/Desktop/Power
\ls | while IFS= read f; do echo mv -vn "$f" "${f/*-/}"; done

This will not rename anything but just show how each file will get renamed. If the output looks ok, run

\ls | while IFS= read f; do mv -vn "$f" "${f/*-/}"; done

PS: This assumes that the only - in the file names is the one right before the number.

Some explanations about what's going on here:

• \ls lists all files, the \ ensures that no alias expansion takes place. The output is fed into a pipe but we do not need to worry about multi-column output because ls in these cases automatically assumes -1
• while ... do; ...; done loops over all lines/files
• IFS= read f reads a file name from standard input into $f. The IFS= ensures that none of the characters on standard input confuses read into expecting two values instead of one (technically this is probably not required here, but it's good practice anyway)
• ${f/*-/} does string substitution on the value of $f, in this case replacing everything up to and including the - with the empty string. See man bash (Parameter Expansion) for details.