Batch renaming files with Bash

You could use bash's parameter expansion feature

for i in ./*.pkg ; do mv "$i" "${i/-[0-9.]*.pkg/.pkg}" ; done

Quotes are needed for filenames with spaces.

If all files are in the same directory the sequence

ls | 
sed -n 's/\(.*\)\(-[0-9.]*\.pkg\)/mv "\1\2" "\1.pkg"/p' | 
sh

will do your job. The sed command will create a sequence of mv commands, which you can then pipe into the shell. It's best to first run the pipeline without the trailing | sh so as to verify that the command does what you want.

To recurse through multiple directories use something like

find . -type f |
sed -n 's/\(.*\)\(-[0-9.]*\.pkg\)/mv "\1\2" "\1.pkg"/p' |
sh

Note that in sed the regular expression grouping sequence is brackets preceded by a backslash, \( and \), rather than single brackets ( and ).

I'll do something like this:

for file in *.pkg ; do
    mv $file $(echo $file | rev | cut -f2- -d- | rev).pkg
done

supposed all your file are in the current directory. If not, try to use find as advised above by Javier.

EDIT: Also, this version don't use any bash-specific features, as others above, which leads you to more portability.

I find that rename is a much more straightforward tool to use for this sort of thing. I found it on Homebrew for OSX

For your example I would do:

rename 's/\d*?\.\d*?\.\d*?//' *.pkg

The 's' means substitute. The form is s/searchPattern/replacement/ files_to_apply. You need to use regex for this which takes a little study but it's well worth the effort.

better use sed for this, something like:

find . -type f -name "*.pkg" |
 sed -e 's/((.*)-[0-9.]*\.pkg)/\1 \2.pkg/g' |
 while read nameA nameB; do
    mv $nameA $nameB;
 done

figuring up the regular expression is left as an exercise (as is dealing with filenames that include spaces)

This seems to work assuming that

• everything ends with $pkg
• your version #'s always start with a "-"

strip off the .pkg, then strip off -..

for x in $(ls); do echo $x $(echo $x | sed 's/\.pkg//g' | sed 's/-.*//g').pkg; done