Help with script to mass rename 1k+ directories

**TheForumTroll** · November 23rd, 2012

I just noticed that all my old photos on my backup are stored in some different directory naming conventions than my newer ones and renaming everything by hand... well lets just say that there is 1000 plus directories that needs fixing and I've let myself become extremely rusty in scripting

Does anyone have time on their hands to write a small script that mass renames them for me?

What I got:

(YEAR) XXX YYY
XXX YYY (YEAR)

How they should be named:

YEAR - XXX YYY

Examples:

From this:

(2001) International Space Station (ISS)
My Dark Basement (1984)

To this:

2001 - International Space Station (ISS)
1984 - My Dark Basement

There's a few [ ] and dashes in the directory names too I think (they don't need changing - just a warning if it messes with the script). The files are fine too (DDMMYYYY.xxx) so it's just the directories that need fixing. I tried googling but only found file mass renaming.

It's on a headless server, so no GUI tools

**Vaphell** · November 23rd, 2012

always 4digits in ()?

**TheForumTroll** · November 23rd, 2012

Yes the year is always in four digits

EDIT: Uh, forgot to say that some directories have no year at all (and hence need no fixing).

**steeldriver** · November 23rd, 2012

The rename command works pretty well for stuff like this - like Vaphell implies, you can refine the expression if you need to be more (or less) specific about the match condition e.g.'[0-9]{4}' (exactly 4 digits) instead of '[0-9]+' (1 or more digits)

Code:

$ mkdir "(2001) International Space Station (ISS)"
$ mkdir "My Dark Basement (1984)"
$
$ rename -nv 's/\(([0-9]+)\) (.*)/$1 - $2/' */
(2001) International Space Station (ISS)/ renamed as 2001 - International Space Station (ISS)/
$
$ rename -nv 's/(.*) \(([0-9]+)\)/$2 - $1/' */
My Dark Basement (1984)/ renamed as 1984 - My Dark Basement/

You can use globstar if you need to do it recursively on subdirectories

**TheForumTroll** · November 23rd, 2012

Hmm, I don't know why but I get no output out of the script at all and nothing changes

EDIT: Oh, there's two different lines. Doh. Let me try again
EDIT 2: Nope, no luck. One line does nothing, the other says it changes it but doesn't.

**cjhabs** · November 23rd, 2012

The -n option to rename shows what the command would do but doesn't actually do it. Once you are happy with the command, remove the -n option.

**TheForumTroll** · November 23rd, 2012

Oh, that will teach me to look more closely at a script before running it

It doesn't go into subdirs and change it, even with globstar on though.

**Vaphell** · November 23rd, 2012

Code:

rename -nv 's/(.*) \(([0-9]+)\)/$2 - $1/'

this will probaly fail with paths

Code:

$ rename -nv 's/(.*) \(([0-9]+)\)/$2 - $1/' ../mass_rename/*(*)*
../mass_rename/abcdef ghi XoXoXo (2063) renamed as 2063 - ../mass_rename/abcdef ghi XoXoXo

standard while read

Code:

#!/bin/bash

while IFS= read -rd $'\0' d
do
  p=${d%/*}; nd=${d##*/}
  if [[ $nd =~ [(][0-9]{4}[)]$ ]]
  then
#    yr=${nd##*(}; yr=${yr%?}
#    nd="$yr - ${nd% *}"
#    echo mv -v "$d" "$p/$nd"
    rename -nv 's|(.*)/(.*) \(([0-9]+)\)|$1/$3 - $2|' "$d"
  elif [[ $nd =~ ^[(][0-9]{4}[)] ]]
  then
#    yr=${nd%%)*}; yr=${yr#?}
#    nd="$yr - ${nd#* }"
#    echo mv -v "$d" "$p/$nd"
    rename -nv 's/\(([0-9]+)\) (.*)/$1 - $2/' "$d"
  fi
done < <( find . -iname '*([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9])*' -type d -print0 )

as a bonus pure bash manipulation in comments.

**TheForumTroll** · November 23rd, 2012

That's....beautiful

Thank you. I had to run it more than once (it doesn't enter a directory after it has been renamed and rename directories in it) but it works. So much time saved. I owe you a beer