[Linux-disciples] Deleting the first couple of characters of a file name.

[Stephen R Laniel]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 10:52:04AM -0600, Karl Sokol wrote:
> I have on my computer a number of songs that begin with the track numbers from
> the c.d. that they were from.  I want to delete these numbers. 
> 
> If i move them all to a single folder, is there a way of deleting the first two
> characters on a bulk of files? 
> Better yet, is there a way of deleting the first two characters only if they
> are numbers, thereby saving me from moving them at all?

This is why god invented the 'rename' tool. This command
will take all the files in a directory called 'foo' and
delete the first 2 characters, only if they are numbers:

rename 's/^\d{1,2}//' foo/*

Actually, that will delete anywhere between one and two
leading digits. To delete only two leading digits, do

rename 's/^\d{2}//' foo/*

To find every file in every subdirectory of foo and delete
leading digits, do

find foo -type f -exec rename 's/^\d{2}//' '{}' \;

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
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