Trim File Names of Tarballs Using Bash

Question

I need to grade some source code from various students. The submission process is through Blackboard which appends to the file name a bunch of unnecessary stuff. Here is an example:

Test Submission_adunn_attempt_2014-04-04-10-48-37_adunn-helloworld.tar.gz

I would like to rename this file (and all others) to:

adunn-helloworld.tar.gz

How can I do this in a Bash script?

Answer 1

You could use shell parameter expansion:

$ s="Test Submission_adunn_attempt_2014-04-04-10-48-37_adunn-helloworld.tar.gz"
$ echo "${s##*_}"
adunn-helloworld.tar.gz

Use a loop for renaming the files:

for f in *.gz; do
  mv "$f" "${f##*_}"
done

Alternatively, you could use prename (a part of perl distribution):

rename 's/.*_//' *.gz