Renaming files in bash

Question

My directory has many files named as "20130101_temp.txt", "20130102_temp.txt", etc.

How do I remove the "_temp" in the names of all these files. ie, rename 20130101_temp.txt to 20130101.txt.

Answer 1

Using bash:

for x in *_temp.txt
do
    mv $x ${x%%_temp.txt}.txt
done

There's also a utility that comes with Perl (at least on Ubuntu) called rename which takes a regular expression, so you could accomplish the same thing with:

rename -n 's/_temp\.txt$/.txt/' *_temp.txt

The -n option initiates a "dry run" that will only show you what is going to be renamed. Remove it to actually perform the rename.

Answer 2

Using a for -loop with a glob to find the files and a parameter substitution to remove the _temp for moving:

for t in ????????_temp.txt; do 
    echo mv ${t} ${t/_temp/}
done

Remove the echo when you've tested that the output looks right on your system.

Answer 3

Try something like this:

for FILENAME in *_temp.txt; do
    mv $FILENAME `echo $FILENAME | sed -e 's/_temp//'`
done

It is usually a good idea to try it out first with the mv replaced with an echo .

Answer 4

It's not a bash solution but since I encounter renaming tasks frequently while being way to lazy to think about a reasonable bash solution, I just got pyRenamer, a GUI tool that does things like that quite well. It's usually installable from the standard repositories.

dlundquists solution works quite well though.