Rename files to change punctuation and numbering

filesrenamescripting

I need a command to recursively rename a large number of jpg files in Ubuntu.

However there are some problems. A normal group of files would look like ani-estate-villas_1431640729_3.jpg, ani-estate-villa_3627544278_7.jpg and ani-estate-villa_3143254376_5.jpg

I need to replace all - with _, remove all numbers and then add numbering which resets in every directory. So the same group of files should look like ani_estate_villas_1.jpg, ani_estate_villas_2.jpg, ani_estate_villas_3.jpg and the same with the other files in the other directories.

The depth of the recursion is 1 or 2 directories deep, so you might find a directory/file.jpg or directory/directory/file.jpg it's pretty much random.

Running a command in every directory with jpgs is also doable so if anyone has any idea on how to rename all files with those characteristics would be fine. Although running one single command is cooler, I'd much appreciate a bit more repetitive solution, because manually changing the 400+ jpg files is too much.

I tried using krename but it deletes my files.

Best Answer

You can use the prename command to rename files based on a transformation written in Perl.

Let's start simple. To rename all the .jpg files in a directory, changing all - to _, we can just use the s operator (we could also use tr). The Perl code is executed to transform each file name.

prename 's!-!_!g' *.jpg

To change the number sequence(s) at the end to a simple counter, we introduce a counter variable. I use the global variable $a as a counter (introducing extra variables is more complicated). The regular expression (\.[^/.]*)$ matches the file extension, and $1 in the replacement text stands for what the parenthesized group matched.

prename 's!-!_!g; ++$a; s!_[0-9_]+(\.[^/.]*)$!_$a$1!' *.jpg

Note that the files are renamed in the order given by the file name arguments, i.e. the order of expansion of *.jpg determines the numbering of the files.

Alternatively, we can initialize the counter explicitly with a BEGIN block.

prename 'BEGIN {$a = 1;} s!-!_!g; s!_[0-9_]+(\.[^/.]*)$!_$a$1!; ++$a;' *.jpg

To perform this in every subdirectory of the current directory, call find.

find -type d -exec sh -c 'cd "$1" && prename "$0" *.jpg' 's!-!_!g; ++$a; s!_[0-9_]+(\.[^/.]*)$!_$a$1!' {} \;

Related Solutions

Shell – Bulk Rename Files with Special Characters

I guess you see this � invalid character because the name contains a byte sequence that isn't valid UTF-8. File names on typical unix filesystems (including yours) are byte strings, and it's up to applications to decide on what encoding to use. Nowadays, there is a trend to use UTF-8, but it's not universal, especially in locales that could never live with plain ASCII and have been using other encodings since before UTF-8 even existed.

Try LC_CTYPE=en_US.iso88591 ls to see if the file name makes sense in ISO-8859-1 (latin-1). If it doesn't, try other locales. Note that only the LC_CTYPE locale setting matters here.

In a UTF-8 locale, the following command will show you all files whose name is not valid UTF-8:

grep-invalid-utf8 () {
  perl -l -ne '/^([\000-\177]|[\300-\337][\200-\277]|[\340-\357][\200-\277]{2}|[\360-\367][\200-\277]{3}|[\370-\373][\200-\277]{4}|[\374-\375][\200-\277]{5})*$/ or print'
}
find | grep-invalid-utf8

You can check if they make more sense in another locale with recode or iconv:

find | grep-invalid-utf8 | recode latin1..utf8
find | grep-invalid-utf8 | iconv -f latin1 -t utf8

Once you've determined that a bunch of file names are in a certain encoding (e.g. latin1), one way to rename them is

find | grep-invalid-utf8 |
rename 'BEGIN {binmode STDIN, ":encoding(latin1)"; use Encode;}
        $_=encode("utf8", $_)'

This uses the perl rename command available on Debian and Ubuntu. You can pass it -n to show what it would be doing without actually renaming the files.

Rename – How to Mass Rename Files with Ill-Formed Numbering

On Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives, you can use the rename Perl script:

rename 's/(?<=-)([0-9]+)/sprintf "%03d", $1/e' prefix-*.ext

Some systems may have this command installed as prename or perl-rename. Note that this is not the rename utility from the util-linux suite which does not provide an easy way to do this.

In zsh, you can use zmv to rename and the l parameter expansion flag to pad with zeroes.

autoload -U zmv
zmv '(prefix-)(*)(.ext)' '$1${(l:3::0:)2}$3'

You can also do this with a plain shell loop. Shells don't have nice string manipulation constructs; one way to pad with zeroes is to add 1000 and strip off the leading 1.

for x in prefix-*.ext; do
  n=${x%.ext}; n=${x##*-}; n=$((n+1000))
  mv "$x" "${x%-*.ext}${n#1}${x##*-}"
done

Another way is to call the printf utility.

for x in prefix-*.ext; do
  n=${x%.ext}; n=${x##*-}
  mv "$x" "${x%-*.ext}$(printf %03d "$n")${x##*-}"
done

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Shell – Bulk Rename Files with Special Characters

Rename – How to Mass Rename Files with Ill-Formed Numbering

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