Batch rename long filenames of variable length with years

Question

I have a bunch of files in a single directory that I would like to rename as follows, example existing names:

1937 - Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.avi
1940 - Pinocchio.avi

Target names:

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937).avi
Pinocchio (1940).avi

Cheers

Answer 1

If you have the Perl based rename (sometimes known as prename) this is indeed possible. If you understand Regular Expresssions it's even straightforward.

rename -n 's!^(\d+) - (.*)\.(...)$!$2 ($1).$3!' *.avi

What this does is split the source filename into three components. Using your first example these would be

• 1937
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
• avi

These are assigned to $1, $2, $3 within the rename command. (These are not bash variables.) It then puts them back together again in the different order.

When you are happy with the proposed result, change the -n to -v, or even remove it entirely.

Answer 2

this is how I'd do it using bash only

cd movie_directory
ls -1 | while read line
do
  year=$(echo ${line} | awk '{print $1}')
  name=$(echo ${line} | cut -d " " -f 3- | cut -d"." -f 1)
  ext=$(echo ${line} | cut -d " " -f 3- | cut -d"." -f 2)
  newname=${name}" ("${year}")."${ext}
  mv "${line}" "${newname}"
done

assumptions:

file names do not contain .
the space characters between the year and - and the file name are actually white spaces, not tab or some other unprintable character.