Ubuntu – How to rename a group of files with what looks like a Windows file path in their names

batch-renamecommand linerename

I got a bunch of files with the filename messed up. All the file names have the same beginning which appear to be windows file directories. The problem is there are 700+ files and I really don't want go through and manually rename all of them. These are examples of the file names (Note: None of these have file directories):

G:some\really\long\file\path\then\the\name1.jpg
G:some\really\long\file\path\then\the\name2.png
G:some\really\long\file\path\then\the\filename.txt
G:some\really\long\file\path\then\the\file_name.mov
...

The important take away is that each file has G:some\really\long\file\path\then\the\ before the file name that I would like.

So I would want the above files to look like:

name1.jpg
name2.png
filename.txt
file_name.mov

I've tried the rename command and was not successful. I am still new with Linux and really am not sure on how to go about it or really what to google. Any help would be appreciated.

Best Answer

I just removed everything up to the last backslash with rename

$ rename -n 's/.*\\//' G*
rename(G:some\really\long\file\path\then\the\file_name.mov, file_name.mov)
rename(G:some\really\long\file\path\then\the\filename.txt, filename.txt)
rename(G:some\really\long\file\path\then\the\name1.jpg, name1.jpg)
rename(G:some\really\long\file\path\then\the\name2.png, name2.png)

Remove -n after testing to actually rename the files.

Notes

-n don't do anything, just print what will be changed
s/old/new replace old with new
.* any number of any characters
\\ The first backslash is to escape the second one.
Since regex are greedy this expression .*\\ eats all the preceding backslashes too.
Since the last two delimiters // are empty everything matched in the search part is deleted

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Ubuntu – How to bulk-add a file’s creation date to the filename

You can use rename with a real Perl expression

$ rename 's/(\d+\.jpg)/use File::stat; sprintf("%s-%s", stat($&)->mtime, $1)/e' * -v
0000.jpg renamed as 1408057200-0000.jpg
0001.jpg renamed as 1408060861-0001.jpg
0002.jpg renamed as 1408064522-0002.jpg

That leaves the files with a time-since-epoch. Find for sorting, poor for reading.

The only problem here is you need to match the whole filename (so that you can stat $& —aka the entire match— inside the substitution). That could get a little tiresome with really complicated names.

We can build on that to have a more conventional date formatting:

$ rename 's/(\d+\.jpg)/use File::stat; use POSIX; sprintf("%s-%s", strftime("%Y%m%d-%H%M%S", localtime(stat($&)->mtime)), $1)/e' * -vn
0000.jpg renamed as 20140815-000000-0000.jpg
0001.jpg renamed as 20140815-010101-0001.jpg
0002.jpg renamed as 20140815-020202-0002.jpg

Ubuntu – Rename files in subfolders with parent folder names

With a loop and some bash string manipulations

while read -rd $'\0' f; do 
  d="${f%/*}"; p="${d/\//_}";
  echo mv -- "$f" "${d}/${p}_${f##*/}"
done < <(find -type f -name '*.jpeg' -printf '%P\0')

(remove the echo once you've confirmed it matches the files correctly)

With the perl-based rename command and bash globstar

shopt -s globstar
rename -nv -- 's|(f\d+)/(ff\d+)/(image\d+)|$1/$2/$1_$2_$3|' **/*.jpeg

(remove the -nv once you've confirmed it matches the files correctly)

Best Answer

Notes

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Ubuntu – How to bulk-add a file’s creation date to the filename

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