Mass renaming, *nix version

Posted by Paolo B. on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Paolo B.
Published on 2009-08-19T06:57:35Z Indexed on 2011/01/12 0:55 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 294

Filed under:

unix

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file

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shell

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rename

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bsd

I was looking for a way to rename a huge number of similarly-named files, much like this one (a Windows-related question) except that I'm using *nix (Ubuntu and FreeBSD, separately). Just to sum up, while using the shell (Bash, CSH, etc.) how do I mass-rename a number of files such that, for example, the following files:

Beethoven - Fur Elise.mp3
Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata.mp3
Beethoven - Ode to Joy.mp3
Beethoven - Rage Over the Lost Penny.mp3

will be renamed like these?

Fur Elise.mp3
Moonlight Sonata.mp3
Ode to Joy.mp3
Rage Over the Lost Penny.mp3

The reason I want to do this is that these collection of files will go under a directory named "Beethoven" (i.e. the filenames' prefix), and having this information on the filename itself will be redundant.

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