renaming files; wildcard selects input, want to return wildcard value in output
I have a set of files as follows:
Q-30-09-1753.TIF
W-01-04-1753.TIF
W-31-12-1752.TIF
Y-14-12-1752.TIF
Using git bash on Windows I wish to rename the files to put the letter at the end of the filename as follows;
30-09-1753-Q.TIF
01-04-1753-W.TIF
31-12-1752-W.TIF
14-12-1752-Y.TIF
I have attempted to use the following code:
for f in *.TIF ; do
mv "$f" "${f//[A-Z]]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[A-Z]/}";
echo "$f"
done
The first part successfully selects the files to change but the wildcard selection is literal when renaming them.
I’d probably be lazy and let sed do this for me
newfilename=$(echo "${f}"|sed 's/(.)-([^.]*).TIF/2-1.TIF/')
mv "${f}" "${newfilename}"
instead of learning the probably excellent, yet separate string replacement methods of bash 🙂
By the way, if these are dates, your date format is bad for sorting. Be more ISO date format instead: YYYY-MM-DD will allow you to sort your file names according to the date correctly! (Otherwise you’ll sort by day-of-month first, then month second, and year last.)
newfilename=$(echo "${f}"|sed 's/(.)-(..)-(..)-(....).TIF/4-3-2-1.TIF/')