Remove an unnecessary suffix from a file name for all files in a directory

for f in $(ls *.xml.skippy); do mv $f `echo $f | sed 's|.skippy||'`; done
For this example, all files in the current directory that end in '.xml.skippy' will have the '.skippy' removed from their names.

-2
By: argherna
2009-11-19 21:36:26

What Others Think

"rename"
TeacherTiger · 837 weeks and 4 days ago
Not on Mac OS X.
argherna · 837 weeks and 4 days ago
Better: for f in *.xml.skippy; do mv "$f" "${f/.skippy/}"; done
eightmillion · 837 weeks and 4 days ago
@eightmillion Try that in pure bash ;) rename -v 's/\w+\.(\dx\d+)\.(.+)\.german.*\.(\w{3,})/$1 - $2.$3/' *
sputnick · 837 weeks and 4 days ago
@sputnick I love a challenge. This isn't perfect, but it's pretty close and can be refined further. for i in *;do if [[ $i =~ [[:alpha:]]+\.[[:digit:]]x[[:digit:]]+\..+\.german.*\.[[:alpha:]]3? ]];then x="${i#*.}";x="${x%%.*}";y="${i#*.*.}";y="${y%%.*}";mv "$i" "$x - $y.${i##*.}";echo "$i renamed as $x - $y.${i##*.}";fi;done
eightmillion · 837 weeks and 4 days ago
I should also note that my previous comment wasn't in response to yours, if that wasn't clear. It was in response to the original posting.
eightmillion · 837 weeks and 4 days ago
@eightmillion - will give yours a try @sputnick - was looking for a way to do the job w/out needing to install anything extra. it gets the job done--a usable one-off for small numbers of files in a directory.
argherna · 837 weeks and 4 days ago
There is one small problem with my version that should probably be changed. "${f/.skippy/}" will strip the first instance of ".skippy" in the filename which would be problematic for files named foo.skippy.xml.skippy. "${f%.skippy}" will only strip ".skippy" from the end of the file name.
eightmillion · 837 weeks and 4 days ago
All excellent feedback. Thanks for the pointers. Much appreciated.
argherna · 837 weeks and 4 days ago
Maybe 'mmv' is available on Mac OS X? mmv '*.skippy' '#1'
hfs · 837 weeks and 4 days ago
@hfs - it is not.
argherna · 837 weeks and 4 days ago

What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

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