It's so short because it's special-purpose rather than general purpose. Perl is a programming language that can do lots and lots of different things. file-rename does one thing, and one thing very well: it renames files using regex

I recommend using a tool designed just for this: https://www.tweaking4all.com/home-theatre/rename-my-tv-series-v2/

No idea lol

I just wanted a rename utility and Arch didn't have the GUI one I used on Mint so I gradually pieced some of this stuff together. If there's one source online that lays it all out I haven't found it yet!

If you'd like me to explain the one here I'll do my best ;)

Edit: nvm, I edited the original comment to explain everything

Cool! Thanks!

Is this standard PERL stuff? How I learn what all these things mean? One day I hope to write my own arguments.

If the naming of each series is that consistent, you could just use parameters in bash and build the new title out of it and then do the rename, in a loop. It would be a very short shell script.

eta: using printf to format the new title variable will let it handle the number formatting clearnly, like 01 for 1

eta: something like this

for f in *"Season "*; do s_ep="${f#*Season }"; s="${s_ep%% Episode*}"; ep_t="${s_ep#*Episode }"; ep="${ep_t%% - *}"; t="${ep_t#* - }"; printf -v new "S%02dE%02d - %s" "$s" "$ep" "$t"; mv "$f" "$new"; done 

Tested this with perl-rename and it seems to work fine:

perl-rename -n 's/.* (\d{1,2}).* (\d{1,2})/sprintf "S%02dE%02d",$1,$2/e' *

-n does a test-run and shows you the results, remove it to do the actual rename

's/ text to find / text to replace it with / modifier' is the format used

. represents any single character

'*' matches the previous character 1 or more times

'.* ' matches any series of characters before a space

() encloses something you want to keep

\ is the escape character

d represents any number

{1,2} means the number will be 1 or 2 digits

In the sprintf, %02d is to format each number with 2 digits.

$1 and $2 pass the first and second values enclosed in parentheses from the first argument into the 2 d's in the "S%02dE%02d" of the second argument.

This link has a better explanation of the /e modifier than I could give you xD

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/perl/perl-e-modifier-in-regular-expression/ ___

Thanks! I'll dig into this tonight. The man page could use a bit of work, too, if you're feeling generous. A lot is assumed to be known.

Edit: Your entry is winning “shortest code” so fa r...

editted for clarity. thanks. I have a bad habit of not providing context. underdeveloped theory of mind.

find command with an exec. Basically, find can list files matching a pattern and then run a command for each of them. The exec will probably be a bit gnarly, though, so if you want something a little more palatable, you want a script that grabs the names of the files into a variable, then takes each entry via a for loop (find command and a bash while read might work), stores it in a variable, changes it based on your pattern (sed might work here), stores the changed name in another variable and then mv $former-name $new-name

This is the kinda small script I use Claude for. So yeh, it's LLM generated. Downvote away.
But I am terrible at writing bash scripts!

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# rename-episodes.sh — run inside the folder, or pass a directory as $1

shopt -s nullglob
cd "${1:-.}" || exit 1

for f in *.mkv; do
    # Match: ... Season N ... Episode N - Title.mkv
    if [[ $f =~ Season\ ([0-9]+)\ Episode\ ([0-9]+)\ -\ (.+)\.mkv$ ]]; then
        season="${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
        episode="${BASH_REMATCH[2]}"
        title="${BASH_REMATCH[3]}"

        # Zero-pad to two digits
        new=$(printf "S%02dE%02d - %s.mkv" "$season" "$episode" "$title")

        if [[ "$f" != "$new" ]]; then
            echo "mv: $f  ->  $new"
            # uncomment the next line to actually move the file
            # mv -n -- "$f" "$new"
        fi
    else
        echo "skip (no match): $f"
    fi
done

I've commented out the mv command so you can test/fiddle/play around with it without clobbering your files.

Some notes from Claude:

Two practical notes:
If your files aren't all .mkv, change the glob (*.mkv) and the regex anchor accordingly, or loop over *.{mkv,mp4,avi}.
This assumes the literal words "Season" and "Episode" appear. If your real filenames vary (e.g. "S1", "1x01", "Ep 1"), the regex needs adjusting

Edit: I just realised that specifically file-rename is mentioned, and looks like you are getting appropriate help in other threads.

Share the rename commands you've tried

I think you want something like this:

$ ls
'Star Trek Next Generation Season 01 Episode 22 - Bob.mkv'
'Star Trek Next Generation Season 1 Episode 1 - Encounter at Farpoint.mkv'
$ file-rename 's/.*Season (\d+) Episode (\d+)/sprintf("S%02dE%02d", $1, $2)/ie' *.mkv
$ ls
'S01E01 - Encounter at Farpoint.mkv'  'S01E22 - Bob.mkv'

If you are getting an angle bracket, it's probably because you didn't add *.mkv at the end.

Because I need to preserve the Season and Episode information.

Replace 'Star Trek The Next Generation Season ' with 'S0'

Replace 'Episode ' with 'E0' or 'E' depending on digits

Keep episode title as is.

Yes, the “etc.” part. Imagine I have 7*24 episodes following this convention. How do I rename them all in one swell foop?

I'll look into it. I'm going to be running a media server eventually, so thinking learning the command line arguments would be a good investment.

In this case, I'm moving these onto DVD and the truncated file names will all look the same on the DVD player, so I need to shorten 24*7 files.

I think he wants to rename more than one file. Sounds like he wants to rename entire folders using that formula.

Re-phrased the title. It's a plain language question.

This doesn't answer your question at all, so my apologies up front.

I'm not at all intending to advertise here, and I'm not at all affiliated with them, but in the past, I've sidestepped having to write scripts by using FileBot. It's always just worked for me.

mv “Star Trek Next Generation Season 1 Episode 1 - Encounter at Farpoint.mkv” “S01E01 - Encounter at Far Point.mkv”  

Or am I missing something about what you're trying to do?

mv

I'm unable to play that game. I need more interactive guidance than what the website provides.

Do the developers have any account on GitHub where I can pull up an issue ?

what’s the outcome you’re trying to achieve? you’ve got a folder full of mkv files and you just want to rename them?

why not keep it simple and use a for loop with mv and awk to perform the rename?

it's already there, now that I see it.

I would have loved MX Linux, but since l'm using my brother's laptop which runs on windows 10, l'm using WSL, whose default is Ubuntu. But this command works in this setup as well l suppose 🙃🙃🙃

Oh yep! If you're on Linux, sudo apt install git should sort you out if you're on a Debian-ish distro (including Mint or Ubuntu). Fedora it's sudo dnf install git, Arch... uhh... I don't know a ton about Arch's pacman.