I‘ve over 1000’s of files starting with _ character as follows:
_file1.txt
_foo1.txt
_2424.txt
_bar10000.txt
How do I remove the first character from a file name:
file1.txt
foo1.txt
2424.txt
bar10000.txt
You can use the rename command as described in our previous faq. The syntax is as follows:
rename "s/regex-rule/replace/g" *.files
To remove _ first character and rename all *.txt files, enter:
rename -v "s/^_//g" *.txt
Use the ls command to verify the same:
$ ls -l
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🐧 13 comments so far... add one ↓
🐧 13 comments so far... add one ↓
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Hello Vivek,
in you example should be:
without “^” rename will be replaced all occurs in argument (file name).
Alternatively we can use “sed”
Thanks for the heads up!
what if the first character has different values?
@Jorge: “^_” means: “all lines with underscore at the beginning”
If first character will be different that “_” rename will just ignore such file.
I cant seem to get that to work. It just comes back instantly. im using
rename -v “s/^_//g” *.jpg
That would mean that it didn’t match anything with both the *.jpg and regex. Are you sure it’s JPG files you want to rename, and are they definitely there!
Also, rename -vn is good – it’ll show you what it’s going to do without actually doing it, great for bulk jobs to make sure you’re doing the right thing.
Plus (!), in the example above the “g” modifier (multi-match) is wasteful, as you already say in the regex you want a “_” starting at the beginning of the line – this can only happen once, so lose the “g”. This modifier should be used sparingly, particularly if you’re not going to use the -n flag to simulate the regex, as that could lead to unwanted replacements.
HTH!
Actually, there are two different rename programs, rename from util-linux and prename, which, on some systems, is the default rename command (/usr/bin/rename is a symlink to prename on those systems)
The util-linux rename will not work as shown at all. This tut only applies to perl rename, or prename.
Regards.
Nice Info. thanks for it..
hello, thanks for the info, but how to remove the first 8 characters?
I want this:
“[7db7eb48] L1E.mp4” renamed as “L1E.mp4”
please help, I am stuck on it.
thanks in advance!
oh I just found it, but it was challenging:
rename -v ‘s/\[\w+\]\s//’ *.mp4
thanks for your inspiring article!
i was looking to do the same and finally managed to write a small loop that worked fine on my mac. I needed to delete the first 24 characters (including spaces) of several avi files so here is what i did:
for file in *avi; do mv “$file” “${file:24}”; done
file is the variable and can have any name – some use i or f etc etc.
you can obviously change the type of files (avi) and the number of characters you want to delete accordingly.
Hope this assists.
${file:24}Nice bash hackery.
PS: It is called substring i.e. bash parameter substitution.
Hello!
I have file with names as:
A2002185.h23v04.005.2007177004246.hdf
A2002201.h23v04.005.2008288062542.hdf
I want to rename them by deleting everything in the name after first dot, how can I do that?
Thank you!