Replace a dynamic file extension with a fixed file extension

Question

I need to replace dynamic file extensions which contain timestamp for certain date with a fixed file extension.

For example,

08242016G0040156.ZIP.20160907141452  
09042016SHOC0003.ZIP.20160904044504

I need these to be replaced with 08242016G0040156.ZIP and 09042016SHOC0003.ZIP respectively.

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 06 '17 at 11:53

3

With bash, a simple loop with some string manipulation

for f in ./*.ZIP.*
do
   mv "$f" "${f%.*}"
done

"${f%.*}" removes everything after the last . (inclusive) in the string in $f.

answered Jan 06 '17 at 11:53

muru

69,900
13
192
292

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 06 '17 at 11:58

1

for filename in $(find . -name '*ZIP*'); do mv $filename $(echo $filename | sed 's|\(.*\)\.ZIP.*|\1.ZIP|g') ; done

answered Jan 06 '17 at 11:58

Karls

21
2

1

see [Why is looping over find's output bad practice?](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/321697/why-is-looping-over-finds-output-bad-practice) – Sundeep Jan 06 '17 at 12:32

Sundeep · Answer 3 · 2017-01-06T12:36:43.017

With perl based rename command:

$ touch 08242016G0040156.ZIP.20160907141452 09042016SHOC0003.ZIP.20160904044504

$ rename -n 's/\.\d+$//' *ZIP*
rename(08242016G0040156.ZIP.20160907141452, 08242016G0040156.ZIP)
rename(09042016SHOC0003.ZIP.20160904044504, 09042016SHOC0003.ZIP)

-n option is for dry run. If the renaming is fine, remove it for actual renaming

If the files can be in multiple sub-directories, use find

find -name '*ZIP*' -exec rename -n 's/\.\d+$//' {} +

If there are characters other than digits after last . use

rename -n 's/\.[^.]+$//' *ZIP*

Replace a dynamic file extension with a fixed file extension

3 Answers3