Renaming part of a filename

Question

I have loads of files which look like this   DET01-ABC-5 50-001 dat     DET01-ABC-5 50-0025 dat   and I want them to look like this   DET01-XYZ-5 50-001 dat     DET01-XYZ-5 50-0025 dat   How can I do this

User · Answer

You ll need to learn how to use sed http   unixhelp ed ac uk CGI man-cgi sed  And also to use for so you can loop through your file entries http   www cyberciti biz faq bash-for-loop   Your command will look something like this  I don t have a term beside me so I can t check  for i in  dir  do mv  i  echo  i   sed   orig new g

User · Answer

There are a couple of variants of a rename command  in your case  it may be as simple as  rename ABC XYZ   dat   You may have a version which takes a Perl regex   rename  s ABC XYZ     dat

User · Answer

Something like this will do it  The for loop may need to be modified depending on which filenames you wish to capture   for fspec1 in DET01-ABC-5 50-  dat   do     fspec2   echo   fspec1    sed  s -ABC- -XYZ-        mv   fspec1    fspec2  done   You should always test these scripts on copies of your data  by the way  and in totally different directories

User · Answer

All of these answers are simple and good  However  I always like to add an interactive mode to these scripts so that I can find false positives      if    -n  inInteractiveMode      then      nbsp  nbsp echo -e -n   oldFileName     newFileName nDo you want to do this change   Y n        nbsp  nbsp read run       nbsp  nbsp    -z  run      run      y       run      Y      amp  amp  mv   oldFileName    newFileName     fi   Or make interactive mode the default and add a force flag  -f   --force  for automated scripts or if you re feeling daring  And this doesn t slow you down too much  the default response is  yes  I do want to rename  so you can just hit the enter key at each prompt  because of the   -z  run  test

User · Answer

for file in   dat   do mv  file   file  ABC XYZ    done   No rename or sed needed  Just bash parameter expansion

User · Answer

I like to do this with sed  In you case   for x in DET01-  dat  do     echo  x   sed -r  s DET01-ABC-      dat mv -v   0   DET01-XYZ- 1 dat    done   sh -e   It is best to omit the  sh -e  part first to see what will be executed

[bash] Renaming part of a filename

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