Bash – renaming mp3 files starting with “-”

bashfilesrename

I've extracted songs from my ipod, but when doing so, every song was renamed "- [original name of the song]" . I wanted to write a bash script that would remove that first "-" because there are maybe a 1000 songs in there and I can't rename each of them manually. I've tried to do it using mv and rename but it won't work because of the special characters. I've looked it up on the internet and I found a solution that consists in replacing "-" with "" but the problem is that I want to remove only the first "-" and not the potential others that can be in my song's name.
I hope I was clear enough and that someone can help me?

Here is my original script :

#!/bin/bash
for f in *; do
  echo "${f}";
  if [[ ${f:0:1} == "-" ]]; then
    echo "renaming ${f}";   
    rename.ul ${f} ${f:1} *.mp3;
fi
done

Best Answer

for f in -*.mp3; do
  echo mv -- "$f" "${f:1}"
done

When you are sure that it does what you want it to do, remove the echo.

The double dash (--) is necessary to stop mv from interpreting the - in the filenames as an option. Quoting the variables is necessary for the cases where the filenames contains spaces.

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Bash – How to rename files with sed and csv

If you happen to have a file that looks like this:

old_name1, new_name1
old_name2, new_name2
old_name3, new_name3

You can do a dirty little trick:

sed 's/^/mv -vi "/;s/, /" "/;s/$/";/' < names.csv | bash -

The sed comamnds (delimited by semicolons) does this (s is for substitute, / is used as a delimiter, any other character would do, @ is often used as well):

s/^/mv -vi "/ - adds mv -vi " at the beginning of each line (^ is beginning of line);
s/, /" "/ - replaces comma followed by a space with " ";
s/$/";/ - appends double quotes to all lines ($ means end of line)

and hence the output of sed will be this:

mv -vi "old_name1" "new_name1"
mv -vi "old_name2" "new_name2"
mv -vi "old_name3" "new_name3"

which will be fed to bash to execute. The quotes around filenames are not mandatory, they just guard any possible spaces in the filenames (however they will defintely not help against spaces followed by a comma, since that is used as delimiter). the -v instructs mv to display what it is doing (in case something goes wrong, you'll know what happened), -i will cause it to ask if it were to overwrite already existing file.

Bash – Is it possible to split file and append the pieces with same extension in one liner

I am assuming you use Linux and GNU split. If so, you can do this directly with split.

So, how does split work? As with most *nix software, its manual is available by running man split. Specifically, the general usage is

split [OPTION]... [INPUT [PREFIX]]

That means that you can specify the prefix yourself. For example, if you split a file called foo and give the prefix bar:

$ ls
foo
$ split foo bar
$ ls
baraa  barab  barac  foo

As you can see, since a prefix was given to split, it has created the files called bar followed by a suffix (aa to ac in this case). So, in your case, you want to give the name of the file as a prefix:

for f in *mp3; do split "$f" "$f"

But you also want to remove the extension so that splitting foo.mp3 does not result in foo.mp3aa but fooaa. This can be done using bash's string manipulation capabilities by writing ${f%.mp3} instead of simple $f.

Finally, you can use another nifty feature of split to add the extension:

   --additional-suffix=SUFFIX
          append an additional SUFFIX to file names.

So, putting it all together:

for f in *mp3; do 
   split --bytes=2500k --additional-suffix=".mp3" -d "$f" "${f%.mp3}_"; 
done

I ran this in a directory that contained the following files:

aa.mp3  bb.mp3  cc.mp3

And it resulted in these split file names:

aa_00.mp3  aa_02.mp3  bb_00.mp3  bb_02.mp3  cc_00.mp3  cc_02.mp3
aa_01.mp3  aa_03.mp3  bb_01.mp3  bb_03.mp3  cc_01.mp3  cc_03.mp3

Best Answer

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