On a *nix without perl rename available
On some *nix there's no rename available, so it's necessary do the
rename using some other method. A few years ago I suggested zmv here which while great, isn't necessarily available either.
Using builtins and sed, we can quickly whip up a shell script to do
this which gives us very similar syntax to the perl rename script,
while lacking some error handling niceness, it gets the job done.
sedrename() {
if [ $# -gt 1 ]; then
sed_pattern=$1
shift
for file in $(ls $@); do
mv -v "$file" "$(sed $sed_pattern <<< $file)"
done
else
echo "usage: $0 sed_pattern files..."
fi
}
Usage
sedrename 's/Beethoven\ -\ //g' *.mp3
before:
./Beethoven - Fur Elise.mp3
./Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata.mp3
./Beethoven - Ode to Joy.mp3
./Beethoven - Rage Over the Lost Penny.mp3
after:
./Fur Elise.mp3
./Moonlight Sonata.mp3
./Ode to Joy.mp3
./Rage Over the Lost Penny.mp3
Say we wanted to create target folders too...
Since mv doesn't create folders we can't using sedrename as it is
here, but it's a fairly small change, so I figure it'd be nice to
include it too.
We need a utility function, abspath (or absolute path) so we can
generate the target folder(s) for a sed/rename pattern which includes
new folder structure.
abspath () { case "$1" in
/*)printf "%s\n" "$1";;
*)printf "%s\n" "$PWD/$1";;
esac; }
This will ensure we know the names of our target folders. When we
rename we'll need to use it on the target file name.
# generate the rename target
target="$(sed $sed_pattern <<< $file)"
# Use absolute path of the rename target to make target folder structure
mkdir -p "$(dirname $(abspath $target))"
# finally move the file to the target name/folders
mv -v "$file" "$target"
Here's the full folder aware script...
sedrename() {
if [ $# -gt 1 ]; then
sed_pattern=$1
shift
for file in $(ls $@); do
target="$(sed $sed_pattern <<< $file)"
mkdir -p "$(dirname $(abspath $target))"
mv -v "$file" "$target"
done
else
echo "usage: $0 sed_pattern files..."
fi
}
Of course, it still works when we don't have specific target folders
too.
If we wanted to put all the songs into a folder, ./Beethoven/ we can do this:
Usage
sedrename 's|Beethoven - |Beethoven/|g' *.mp3
before:
./Beethoven - Fur Elise.mp3
./Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata.mp3
./Beethoven - Ode to Joy.mp3
./Beethoven - Rage Over the Lost Penny.mp3
after:
./Beethoven/Fur Elise.mp3
./Beethoven/Moonlight Sonata.mp3
./Beethoven/Ode to Joy.mp3
./Beethoven/Rage Over the Lost Penny.mp3
Bonus round...
Using this script to move files from folders into a single folder:
Assuming we wanted to gather up all the files matched, and place them
in the current folder, we can do it:
sedrename 's|.*/||' **/*.mp3
before:
./Beethoven/Fur Elise.mp3
./Beethoven/Moonlight Sonata.mp3
./Beethoven/Ode to Joy.mp3
./Beethoven/Rage Over the Lost Penny.mp3
after:
./Beethoven/ # (now empty)
./Fur Elise.mp3
./Moonlight Sonata.mp3
./Ode to Joy.mp3
./Rage Over the Lost Penny.mp3
Note on sed regex patterns
Regular sed pattern rules apply in this script, these patterns aren't
PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions). You could have sed
extended regular expression syntax, using either sed -r or sed -E
depending on your platform.
See the POSIX compliant man re_format for a complete description of
sed basic and extended regexp patterns.
