Renaming files to remove parenthesized strings

filesrename

I have a collection of files with names like these:

Ace of Aces (Europe).mp4
Action Fighter (USA, Europe) (v1.2).mp4
Addams Family, The (Europe).mp4
Aerial Assault (USA).mp4
After Burner (World).mp4
Air Rescue (Europe).mp4
Aladdin (Europe).mp4
Alex Kidd - High-Tech World (USA, Europe).mp4
Alex Kidd in Miracle World (USA, Europe) (v1.1).mp4
Alex Kidd in Shinobi World (USA, Europe).mp4
Alex Kidd - The Lost Stars (World).mp4
Alf (USA).mp4
Alien 3 (Europe).mp4
Alien Storm (Europe).mp4
Alien Syndrome (USA, Europe).mp4
Altered Beast (USA, Europe).mp4
American Baseball (Europe).mp4
American Pro Football (Europe).mp4
Andre Agassi Tennis (Europe).mp4
Arcade Smash Hits (Europe).mp4
Assault City (Europe) (Light Phaser).mp4

(I have these filenames listed in a text file.)

I have to get away from parentheses, so I would like to rename the files
to remove the parentheses and the text between them,
so the filenames will be as follows:

Ace of Aces.mp4
Action Fighter.mp4
Addams Family, The.mp4
Aerial Assaul.mp4
After Burner.mp4
Air Rescue.mp4
Aladdi.mp4
Alex Kidd - High-Tech World.mp4
Alex Kidd in Miracle World.mp4
Alex Kidd in Shinobi World.mp4
Alex Kidd - The Lost Stars.mp4
Alf.mp4
Alien 3.mp4
Alien Storm.mp4
Alien Syndrome.mp4
Altered Beast.mp4
American Baseball.mp4
American Pro Footbal.mp4
Andre Agassi Tennis.mp4
Arcade Smash Hits.mp4
Assault City.mp4

Ideally, any solution should alert me if I have, for example, files like
Aladdin (Europe).mp4 and Aladdin (Asia).mp4,
or Ghostbusters (1984).mp4 and Ghostbusters (2016).mp4,
and not destroy any files.

Best Answer

Use this :

rename 's/\s*\([^\)]+\)//g' *.mp4

Should be the perl's rename command, if it's not this one, you can download it with no dependencies from cpan.org

Related Solutions

Renaming files based on the contents of a text file

while read line ; do 
    mv $line 
done < data_lat_long.txt

Redirect the contents of data_lat_long.txt to a while loop that uses read to read in the each line of the file and for each line assign it to a variable called $line. Then run mv with the contents of $line as an argument (which is the from and to parts you have specified in your data_lat_long.txt file). Keep on looping until the end of file.

Note this implicitly expects that neither file names in your data_lat_long.txt contain spaces (so that there are only two columns).

If files have spaces in them, then I suggest a comma separator in your file:

1,space file1
2,space file2
3,space file3

and then use:

while IFS=',' read -a files 
do 
   mv "${files[0]}" "${files[1]}" 
done < list.txt

That makes use of the -a option of read which assigns the text separated by the IFS (in this case comma) to an array called $files. We then index the various elements on the mv and quote the arguments with double quotes "". This is so the array value is expanded on execution of the mv command and so the space in the file is not seen as argument separator by mv. mv 1 space file1 does not do the same thing as mv "1" "space file1". The former command attempts to move files/directories called 1 and space to a directory called file1.

Renaming files using list

If your mapping file is comma separated, you can do this:

while IFS=, read orig target; do
    mv "$orig" "$target"
done < mapping.txt

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Renaming files based on the contents of a text file

Renaming files using list

Related Question