up vote 2 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

I've got a bunch of numbered files like this:

file #01.ext
file #02.ext
file #03.ext
file #04.ext
file #05.ext

And what I want is to make them all have three digits (two leading 0's) instead of one, so;

file #001.ext
file #002.ext
file #003.ext
file #004.ext
file #005.ext

My thought is to use sed to replace the # with #0 (which in my case is good enough, there are no files over #99 yet). All the files are in the same folder, how would I do that?

link|improve this question
95% accept rate
feedback

3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

To protect files with 3 digits already

for f in "file #"*.ext; do
  num=${f#file #}
  num=${num%.ext}
  new=$(printf "file #%03d.ext" $num)
  echo mv "$f" "$new"
done
link|improve this answer
This could've saved me a step earlier. I've been doing it all with sed, and used ls | grep '[0-9]\{3\}' | sed 's|\(.*\)#0\(.*\)|mv "&" "\1#\2"|' | sh just to make them have two digits, and then did it the way I listed above. – Rob Oct 30 '11 at 15:20
I've changed this to the answer, now that I'm learning more about all of this, this is more practical and adaptable. – Rob Nov 8 '11 at 18:44
feedback
up vote 1 down vote

This does the trick from within the folder:

ls | sed 's/\(.*\)#\(.*\)/mv "&" "\1#0\2"/' | sh
link|improve this answer
ls piped to sed piped to sh? My brain is melting. – phogg Nov 4 '11 at 13:14
The you probably don't want to see find piped through grep piped through sed piped to sh. :D – Rob Nov 4 '11 at 13:48
Any particular reason this is bad? – Rob Nov 4 '11 at 14:50
In fact, I'd be much better with find -> generate shell code. The reason for this is that find is less likely to mangle filenames than ls. In the real world I'd just use mmv for this, or a while read command substitution loop pulling nul-terminated filenames from find. Or, if the files are nicely globbable, a simple for loop as glenn used in his answer. – phogg Nov 4 '11 at 17:42
feedback
up vote 0 down vote

This is a hybrid solution:

ls | sed -r "s/(.*#)([0-9]+)([^0-9]*)/printf 'mv -v \"&\" \"%s%03d%s\"' \"\1\" \"\2\" \"\3\"/e;e"
link|improve this answer
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.