Batch Renaming with Bash

Question

How can Bash rename a series of packages to remove their version numbers? I've been toying around with both expr and %%, to no avail.

Examples:

Xft2-2.1.13.pkg becomes Xft2.pkg

jasper-1.900.1.pkg becomes jasper.pkg

xorg-libXrandr-1.2.3.pkg becomes xorg-libXrandr.pkg

Answer 1

better use sed for this, something like:

find . -type f -name "*.pkg" |
 sed -e 's/((.*)-[0-9.]*\.pgk)/\1 \2.pkg/g' |
 while read nameA nameB; do
    mv $nameA $nameB;
 done

figuring up the regular expression is left as an exercise (as is dealing with filenames that include spaces)

Answer 2

This seems to work assuming that

• everything ends with $pkg
• your version #'s always start with a "-"

strip off the .pkg, then strip off -..

for x in $(ls); do echo $x $(echo $x | sed 's/\.pkg//g' | sed 's/-.*//g').pkg; done

Answer 3

You could use bash's parameter expansion feature

for i in *.pkg ; do mv $i ${i/-[0-9.]*.pkg/.pkg} ; done

Answer 4

I'll do something like this:

for file in *.pkg ; do
    mv $file $(echo $file | rev | cut -f2- -d- | rev).pkg
done

supposed all your file are in the current directory. If not, try to use find as advised above by Javier.

EDIT: Also, this version don't use any bash-specific features, as others above, which leads you to more portability.

Answer 5

If all files are in the same directory the sequence

ls | 
sed -n 's/\(.*\)\(-[0-9.]*\.pkg\)/mv "\1\2" "\1.pkg"/p' | 
sh

will do your job. The sed command will create a sequence of mv commands, which you can then pipe into the shell. It's best to first run the pipeline without the trainling | sh so as to verify that the command does what you want.

To recurse through multiple directories use something like

find . -type f |
sed -n 's/\(.*\)\(-[0-9.]*\.pkg\)/mv "\1\2" "\1.pkg"/p' |
sh