I have a lot of data with file names like this:
combination.2005.0801.txt
combination.2005.0802.txt
...
combination.2005.0830. txt
What should I do if I want to rename that files to be like this?
20100801.txt
20100802.txt
...
20100803.txt
I already tried to use the following script, but unfortunately the script is not working.
rename 's/combination.(.*).(.*).txt/$1.txt/' *.txt
When using (Perl compatible; or more general, most) regular expressions, you'll have to keep in mind that . will match any character; not just periods (but also only one character unless there's a quantifier).
The following is untested, but i'd probably try to use this solution based on this question and answers:
$ for old in ./combination*.txt; do
new=$(echo $old | sed -r 's/combination\.([[:digit:]]+)\.([[:digit:]]+)\.txt$/\\1\\2.txt/')
mv -v "$old" "$new"
done
Keep in mind that this is untested and might break. You could also use echo rather than mv to test the whole thing first. :)
$ for i in combination*.txt; do
mv $i $(echo $i | awk -F\. '{print $2$3"."$4}');
done
\ (backslash) between the -F and the .?