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i'm embarrassed i even have to ask but I have a directory with m4a files that have the number of the track from the cd appended to the beginning of the filename, such as this: 

1-01 Smash.m4a

how can I remove the "1-01 " using rename? or any other linux command for that matter. If it makes a difference, i'm on fedora-13.

EDIT (bonus points if you can explain why this doesn't work) just as a test, i tried this: 

rename 1-0?? SSS *.m4a

without any changes made to any of the filenames in the directory

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1 Answer

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Give this a whirl (in the directory with the files you want to rename):-

for i in *; do mv -v "$i" "$(echo "$i" | cut -f2- -d ' ')"; done
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well, i don't know what this is (perl?) but it worked on all but one filename. to be fair, it is the special case in the directory: 1-04 Bass Suite #1.m4a ...the problem is, i'm still no more knowledgeable about rename. Is this not doable with rename? – Ramy Dec 19 '10 at 1:10
It's just shell... so you should be able to run that straight from the commandline. I'd imagine it is doable with rename, but I've not used it much myself. – Andy Smith Dec 19 '10 at 1:12
rename 's/^\d+-\d+\s//g' *.m4a should do the trick, though! – Andy Smith Dec 19 '10 at 1:14
2  
@Ramy, @Andy: On Debian, rename is actually prename, a Perl script that uses regexes. On other systems, rename is a much simpler utility (from util-linux-ng, IIRC) which only accepts fixed "from" and "to" strings. – grawity Dec 19 '10 at 12:25
2  
@Michael: Process creation costs a lot more on WinNT than it does on most Unix-like OSes. (This is why threads are more common on Windows than fork() is.) – grawity Dec 19 '10 at 12:28
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