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Linux novice here.

I'm building my very first bash script and I've written code to truncate and clean up csv file names however its very static and I have to manually count characters I wish to truncate. I'd like to dynamically remove the prefix of files. I've seen numerous examples where folks keep the prefix but I effectively, want to keep the last 7 chars (or more....including file extension.)

Sample below.

# Sample of filenames in a folder
SOLO_PAL3.xyz.ino.IVC.csv   ->  renamed to   IVC.csv
SOLO_PAL3.xyz.ino.EVC.csv   ->  renamed to   EVC.csv
SOLO_PAL3.xyz.ino.VVC.csv   ->  renamed to   VVC.csv
SOLO_PAL3.xyz.ino.WVC.csv   ->  renamed to   WVC.csv

Filename Truncation - while this works, cut -c19- requires manual updating for the integer for specific file lengths at present. I left echo on in this example so I can see the change before I execute.

for file in ???*;      
    do echo mv $file `echo $file | cut -c19-`; 
    # Something equivalent to RIGHT($file,$file.length-($file.length)-7))?
done

Many thanks in advance!

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2 Answers 2

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Your question is rather similar to this one, and my answer is based partially on an answer to that question.

for f in *.csv
do
  newf="${f%.csv}"
  newf="${newf##*.}"
  printf '%s.csv\n' "${newf}"
done

Since you define the problem universe as the set of all *.csv files, this loop first removes the .csv from the end of the filename. Next, it removes the longest possible prefix that consists of any string of characters followed by a dot .. Finally, it printfs the remaining base filename and re-appends the .csv.

The actual mechanics of doing the mv command are left as an exercise to the reader.

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  • 1
    Jim, I reviewed your link, so thanks again for your answer and sharing. To close the loop completely for future readers, I replaced your print statement above with mv -- "$f" "${newf}.csv"; to actually replace the files with the updated files. Commented Apr 13, 2021 at 15:07
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Using the perl rename utility:

rename -n 's/^.*\.(.{3}\.csv)$/$1/' *.csv

The -n makes this a dry-run, so it won't actually rename any files, just display what it would do. Check that it does what you want and run it again without -n (or replace -n with -v for verbose output).

NOTE: this only works with the perl rename utility and not other programs with the same name (in particular, the rename utility from the util-linux package is a completely different program with completely different features and command-line options).

You can check if you have perl rename by running it with -V. The output will be similar to:

$ rename -V
/usr/bin/rename using File::Rename version 1.13, File::Rename::Options version 1.10

The executable for perl rename is sometimes called prename or file-rename. Adjust the command lines above to use them if that's what you have installed.

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  • Thank you, cas but this one is a little over my head at the moment. I am doing all of this in a devcontainer so while I'm certain I can add a reference for perl, I'm still learning on how to add references and such. I found this reference which seems comprehensive https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22577767/get-the-perl-rename-utility-instead-of-the-built-in-rename Commented Apr 13, 2021 at 14:55

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