Hi All,
I’ve got some audio books that I’ve ripped to my file system as MP3’s.
All the file names were written with spaces (ex. Track 1.mp3)
I want to batch move them to to file names without the space sort of like
for filename in ls;
do
mv $filename filename_no_spaces
done
I know this is an extremely simplistic representation of a more complicated bit of scripting… or maybe it’s simpler than I think…
I found that “filename in” grabs each set of characters and separates them at the “space” character so that I get back “Track” and “1.mp3” as separate values.
I also want to add a zero before numeric characters [1-9] but not before [11-xx]
So “Track 1.mp3” becomes “Track_01.mp3” but “Track 10.mp3” becomes “Track_10.mp3”
I’ve not been doing any scripting for the last few years and I’ve forgotten just about everything. Any help greatly appreciated.
Good suggestions; I always learn something fun from your input.
I would, personally, have used the rename command for both of these (note
the need to run rename multiple times in the examples below if there are
MULTIPLE spaces in the names):
rename ’ ’ ‘_’ *.mp3
The rename command’s manpage actually includes an example for adding
leading-zeros to numbers.
Good luck.
On 01/30/2011 07:06 PM, ken yap wrote:
>
> You can use the new bash matching facilities.
>
> First of all you have to forget about ls. That will break arguments
> at spaces. If you want the contents of the whole directory, try this:
>
>
> Code:
> --------------------
> for f in *
> --------------------
>
>
> or perhaps
>
>
> Code:
> --------------------
> for f in *.mp3
> --------------------
>
>
> Then inside the loop you have to refer to “$f”.
>
> To change the spaces to s, do this:
>
>
> Code:
> --------------------
> mv “$f” "${f// /}"
> --------------------
>
>
> To add 0 to single digit names, try this second pass:
>
>
> Code:
> --------------------
> for f in Track_[0-9].mp3
> do
> mv “$f” “${f/Track_/Track_0}”
> done
> --------------------
>
>
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Errm, I might not know enough to be giving advice here since batch renames are something of a black art and I’m not sure what I would do, but I am pretty sure you can just use the “rename” command. See “man 1 rename”. Basically I think the rather cryptic and somewhat dangerous looking
rename \ _ *.mp3
will replace the space in each filename with an underscore. Note that’s two spaces after the \ character, i.e. an escaped space, followed by a normal space to separate the from and to arguments of the rename command. Oh wait quoting works too, it seems:
rename " " _ *.mp3
As to adding the zero, there I’m not so sure, maybe something like
rename Track_ Track_0 Track_?.mp3
after you’ve already done the above command, since the filenames with double digits won’t be included in the list of files brought in by Track_?.mp3. As I said I’m no expert, and batch renaming seems like a good way to bugger up a lot of stuff at once, so maybe be careful and take what I’m saying with a grain of salt. Oh and I guess my answer isn’t really a script but I guess you could put the two commands in a row in a script file
Edit: Oh wait Jim Henderson beat me to it but I’ll leave this and just add that I think it only replaces the first occurance in each filename, so if there were two spaces per filename then you might have to run it twice.
Since rename is actually a Perl script, you could also write a custom Perl script and feed the filenames into it. Then you can do really cool things with regexes if the requirements get complex:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
while (<>) {
chomp($_);
($n = $_) =~ s/ /_/g;
($n2 = $n) =~ s/(\D)(\d\.mp3)/${1}0$2/;
$n = $n2 if ($n2 ne $n);
rename($_, $n);
}
