Rename files add dashes after fourth and sixth characters

Question

I have some files such as:

20150716_something-here
20150716_something-heretoo
20150716_something-hereaswell

They need to be renamed as

2015-07-16_something-here
2015-07-16_something-heretoo
2015-07-16_something-hereaswell

I tried using a perl implementation of the rename command (see my comment on the accepted answer) but I was not successful.

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered May 20 '16 at 07:16

3

Using bash's built-in substring expansion:

for f in 2015* ; do
  mv "$f" "${f::4}-${f:4:2}-${f:6}"
done

answered May 20 '16 at 07:16

JigglyNaga

7,886

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered May 20 '16 at 04:02

2

With sed:

LC_ALL=C sed -e 's/\([0-9]\{4\}\)\([0-9]\{2\}\)\([0-9]\{2\}\)/\1_\2_\3/' <file

answered May 20 '16 at 04:02

cuonglm

153,898

1

How does this rename a file? – Wildcard May 20 '16 at 05:27
This one just format the text, it does not rename the file – cuonglm May 20 '16 at 05:34

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered May 20 '16 at 07:11

While rename is a very powerful tool, I normally prefer the simplicity of the mmv (multiple move) utility:

mmv '????????_*' '#1#2#3#4-#5#6-#7#8_#9'

The ? in the search pattern stands for a single character, the * for an arbitrarily long sequence of characters. In the replacement pattern, every #<number> stands for a corresponding ? or * in the search pattern. In addition to ? and *, mmv supports character ranges within brackets (like [a-f]).

(mmv will test for any conflicts in renaming before it starts work, so you do not risk losing files by overwriting.)

cas · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-20T05:20:14.183

Using the perl rename command (which is completely different to the rename command from util-linux):

rename -v 's/^(\d{4})(\d{2})(\d{2})/$1-$2-$3/' 2015*

(use -n rather than -v for a dry-run to test the command first).

This perl version of rename may be called prename or file-rename on your system. It is far more capable and useful than the util-linux version of rename. If you don't have it installed, you should install it. If it isn't packaged for your distro, you can install from CPAN

BTW, you can tell if you already have it installed by running rename -V. If it produces output like this:

$ rename -V
Unknown option: V
Usage: rename [-v] [-n] [-f] perlexpr [filenames]

or this:

$ rename -V
/usr/bin/rename using File::Rename version 0.20

Then you have perl rename installed. The former indicates an old version (which AFAIK lives on only on pre-jessie debian installs, included as part of the perl package). The latter indicates the current version (now a separate package called rename).

wooops, I did not realize I was using a perl implementation of rename. Installed this package using homebrew via brew install rename, now doing brew info rename prompts "Perl-powered file rename script" — Adriano, May 27 '16 at 07:24
you might also be interested in this other answer i wrote about perl rename: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/283606/7696 — cas, May 27 '16 at 07:32

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered May 19 '16 at 22:05

0

On my distribution I have the perl-rename command, which can use a perl-style regex to bulk-rename files. The rename command only accepts a pair of fixed strings for the rename.

answered May 19 '16 at 22:05

Chris Elston

76

score 0 · Answer 6 · edited May 20 '16 at 04:13

quick and dirty not full solution

#!/usr/bin/env bash
str=$1
yyyy=$(echo "$str" | awk -F '_' '{print $1}' | awk '{print substr($0, 1, 4)}')
mm=$(echo "$str" | awk -F '_' '{print $1}' | awk '{print substr($0, 5, 2)}')
dd=$(echo "$str" | awk -F '_' '{print $1}' | awk '{print substr($0, 7, 2)}')
new_str=$yyyy-$mm-$dd'_'`echo $str | awk -F'_' '{print $2}'`
echo $new_str

output:

$ bash script.sh '20150716_something-here'
2015-07-16_something-here

Rename files add dashes after fourth and sixth characters

6 Answers6

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