Using sed to mass rename files

Question

Objective

Change these filenames:

• F00001-0708-RG-biasliuyda
• F00001-0708-CS-akgdlaul
• F00001-0708-VF-hioulgigl

to these filenames:

• F0001-0708-RG-biasliuyda
• F0001-0708-CS-akgdlaul
• F0001-0708-VF-hioulgigl

Shell Code

To test:

ls F00001-0708-*|sed 's/\(.\).\(.*\)/mv & \1\2/'

To perform:

ls F00001-0708-*|sed 's/\(.\).\(.*\)/mv & \1\2/' | sh

My Question

I don't understand the sed code. I understand what the substitution command

$ sed 's/something/mv'

means. And I understand regular expressions somewhat. But I don't understand what's happening here:

\(.\).\(.*\)

or here:

& \1\2/

The former, to me, just looks like it means: "a single character, followed by a single character, followed by any length sequence of a single character"--but surely there's more to it than that. As far as the latter part:

& \1\2/

I have no idea. I really want to understand this code. Please help me out here, guys.

Answer 1

The backslash-paren stuff means, "while matching the pattern, hold on to the stuff that matches in here." Later, on the replacement text side, you can get those remembered fragments back with "\1" (first parenthesized block), "\2" (second block), and so on.

Answer 2

First, I should say that the easiest way to do this is to use the rename command.

rename s/0000/000/ F0000*

That's about a million times more readable.

As for understanding the sed command, the sed manpage is helpful. If you run man sed and search for & (using the / command to search), you'll find it's a special character in s/foo/bar/ replacements.

  s/regexp/replacement/
         Attempt  to match regexp against the pattern space.  If success‐
         ful,  replace  that  portion  matched  with  replacement.    The
         replacement may contain the special character & to refer to that
         portion of the pattern space  which  matched,  and  the  special
         escapes  \1  through  \9  to refer to the corresponding matching
         sub-expressions in the regexp.

Therefore, \(.\) matches the first character, which can be referenced by \1. Then . matches the next character, which is always 0. Then \(.*\) matches the rest of the filename, which can be referenced by \2.

The replacement string puts it all together using & (the original filename) and \1\2 which is every part of the filename except the 2nd character, which was a 0.

This is a pretty cryptic and retarded way to do this, IMHO. If for some reason the rename command was not available and you wanted to use sed to do the rename (or perhaps you were doing something too complex for rename?), being more explicit in your regex would make it much more readable. Perhaps something like:

ls F00001-0708-*|sed 's/F0000\(.*\)/mv & F000\1/' | sh

Being able to see what's actually changing in the s/search/replacement/ makes it much more readable. Also it won't keep sucking characters out of your filename if you accidentally run it twice or something.

Answer 3

The parentheses capture particular strings for use by the backslashed numbers.

Answer 4

you've had your sed explanation, now you can use just the shell, no need external commands

for file in F0000*
do
    echo mv "$file" "${file/#F0000/F000}"
    # ${file/#F0000/F000} means replace the pattern that starts at beginning of string
done

Answer 5

The sed command

s/\(.\).\(.*\)/mv & \1\2/

means to replace:

\(.\).\(.*\)

with:

mv & \1\2

just like a regular sed command. However, the parentheses, & and \n markers change it a little.

The search string matches (and remembers as pattern 1) the single character at the start, followed by a single character, follwed by the rest of the string (remembered as pattern 2).

In the replacement string, you can refer to these matched patterns to use them as part of the replacement. You can also refer to the whole matched portion as &.

So what that sed command is doing is creating a mv command based on the original file (for the source) and character 1 and 3 onwards, effectively removing character 2 (for the destination). It will give you a series of lines along the following format:

mv F00001-0708-RG-biasliuyda F0001-0708-RG-biasliuyda
mv abcdef acdef

and so on.

Answer 6

If all you're really doing is removing the second character, regardless of what it is, you can do this:

s/.//2

but your command is building a mv command and piping it to the shell for execution.

This is no more readable than your version:

find -type f | sed -n 'h;s/.//4;x;s/^/mv /;G;s/\n/ /g;p' | sh

The fourth character is removed because find is prepending each filename with "./".

Answer 7

 ls F00001-0708-*|sed 's|^F0000\(.*\)|mv & F000\1|' | bash