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i have a directory full of sub-directories with names like

  • 01 - title of folder
  • 02 - second title
  • 03 - etc
  • 04 - etc . . .
  • 30 - final folder

i want to truncate all of these folder names to just be the numbers so they would appear like so:

  • 01
  • 02
  • 03

is there a way to write a script or a simple command that will accomplish this?

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1 Answer 1

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Using the Perl-based rename utility (which appears to be what Ubuntu provides), you could do the renaming operation like this (replacing * with whichever list of directories you actually want):

rename 's/^(\S+).*/$1/' *

(I suggest using rename -n at first to see what would be done before actually renaming anything.)

The replacement string asks to match a sequence of non-space characters (\S+) at the start (^) of the original file name, followed by anything (.*), and replacing it with the first matched group ($1), which was the initial space-free segment.

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  • this worked perfectly thanks! is there a document somewhere that shows all the string commands? the ^(\S+) etc Commented Feb 3, 2017 at 22:12
  • The syntax used by this version of the rename command is that of Perl regular expressions; you can access its documentation using man perlre if installed on your system, or e.g. at perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html Commented Feb 4, 2017 at 5:26

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