renaming files in a folder

Question

In one directory I have many files which look like this:

Galaxy100-[0025-CL3.single.bed].bed

and I would like to change it to:

0025-CL3.single.bed

I tried this rename 's/Galaxy[0-9] - \[//' *, but it did not change anything.

How is possible to rename these files?

Look at man rename; you are using the wrong syntax for the version of rename on your OS. Also see http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/238862/135943 — Wildcard, May 23 '16 at 23:31
You're only matching a single digit after Galaxy. You need to use [0-9]+ to match any number of digits. And you shouldn't have spaces around -. — Barmar, May 23 '16 at 23:43
You need prename, not rename (rename is only prename on Debian and derivatives). — Gilles 'SO- stop being evil', May 23 '16 at 23:47

Barmar · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-24T00:35:27.163

2

Your regular expression doesn't match the pattern in your filename. To match at least one digit, you need to use [0-9]+ (you can also use \d to match digits); your pattern will only match 1 digit. Your example filename doesn't have spaces around -, but you have them in the pattern. And you're not doing anything to remove the ] at the end. Try:

rename 's/Galaxy\d+-\[(.*)\].*/$1/' Galaxy*

edited May 24 '16 at 00:35

answered May 23 '16 at 23:46

Barmar

9,927

In CentOS 6 it did not work, but it work almost in Ubuntu 14.04 and I got 0025-CL3.single.bed.bed. How is it possible to remove the file extension? – user977828 May 24 '16 at 00:33
I've changed the pattern to match everything after the ]. – Barmar May 24 '16 at 00:36

renaming files in a folder

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