Bash script for regex file renaming

Question

I'm very new to Bash scripts and would like to test it out on the following problem I have. I currently have a lot of files in a directory in the form

V3_August_'day'_0_'simulations'.pickle

where 'day' and 'simulations' represent variables that change for different files. I would like to convert these into the form

V3_2012_8_'day+1'_0_'simulations'.pickle

What would a script that iterates through these files, renaming them as required be?

I'm not sure, but I don't think that a bash script would necessarily be the best idea/easy/possible (OK, it would probably be possible, but probably also ugly). Perhaps you should try using Perl. — BenjiWiebe
– BenjiWiebe, Commented Aug 5, 2013 at 18:32
Ah ok, for some reason I thought Bash was good for dealing with these things. I wrote something to do it in Python instead. — rwolst
– rwolst, Commented Aug 5, 2013 at 18:40
Sample fileNames would be V3_August_1_0_2000.pickle or V3_August_5_0_400.pickle to V3_2012_8_2_0_2000.pickle and V3_2012_8_6_0_400.pickle — rwolst
– rwolst, Commented Aug 5, 2013 at 19:03

anubhava · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-05 18:47:42Z

3

Pure bash based solution:

for x in *.pickle; do
   [[ $x =~ ^([^_]+_[^_]+_)([^_]+)(_.+)$ ]] && mv "$x" \
     "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}$((${BASH_REMATCH[2]} + 1))${BASH_REMATCH[3]}"
done

answered Aug 5, 2013 at 18:47

anubhava

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