Alternative for AWK use

Question

I'd love to have a more elegant solution for a mass rename of files, as shown below. Files were of format DEV_XYZ_TIMESTAMP.dat and we needed them as T-XYZ-TIMESTAMP.dat. In the end, I copied them all (to be on the same side) into renamed folder:

ls -l *dat|awk '{system("cp " $10 " renamed/T-" substr($10, index($10, "_")+1))}'

So, first I listed all dat files, then picked up 10th column (file name) and executed a command using awk's system function. The command was essentially copying of original filename into renamed folder with new file name. New file name was created by removing (awk substring function) prefix before (including) _ and adding "T-" prefix.

Effectively:

cp DEV_file.dat renamed/T-file.dat

Is there a way to use cp or mv together with some regex rules to achieve the same in a bit more elegant way?

Thx

user_548225 · Answer

You may use this script:

for file in *.dat; do
   f="${file//_/-}"
   mv "$file" renamed/T-"${f#*-}"
done

You must avoid parsing output of ls command.

user_12991188 · Answer

If you have rename utilitity

rename -E "s/[^_]*/T/" -e "s/_/-/g" *dat

Demo

$ls -1
ABC_DEF_TIMESTAMP.dat
DEV_XYZ_TIMESTAMP.dat
$rename -E  "s/[^_]*/T/" -e "s/_/-/g" * 
$ls -1
T-DEF-TIMESTAMP.dat
T-XYZ-TIMESTAMP.dat
$

user_8133920 · Answer

This is how I would do it:

cpdir=renamed
for file in *dat; do
    newfile=$(echo "$file" | sed -e "s/[^_]*/T/" -e "y/_/-/")
    cp "$file" "$cpdir/$newfile"
done

The sed scripts transforms every non-underscore leading characters in a single T and then replaces every _ with -. If cpdir is not sure to exist before execution, you can simply add mkdir "$cpdir" after first line.

Alternative for AWK use

3 Answers