Replace string in file names, bash one-liner
Alec Jacobson
December 05, 2009
After running lame on a bunch of wav files I ended up with tons of files named:
song1.wav.mp3
song2.wav.mp3
song3.wav.mp3
song4.wav.mp3
...
Now, obviously I could have avoided this in this case with the proper options and arguments to lame, but it's all in hindsight.
Here's the bash line I use to strip out .wav from the middle of all these files in the current directory:
for filename in *.mp3; do newname=`echo $filename | sed 's/\.wav\.mp3$/.mp3/g'`; mv $filename $newname; done
It's long for one line but I think it's still understandable and manageable. The result is:
song1.mp3
song2.mp3
song3.mp3
song4.mp3
...
Note: I notice that I'm being overly carefully with my regexes and wildcards in the example above but it should make it more clear how to adapt it to your case.