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How to Rename “Star Trek Next Generation Season 1 Episode 1 - Encounter at Farpoint.mkv” to “S01E01 - Encounter at Far Point.mkv” etc.? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/linux4noobs@programming.dev
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Hi, y'all. Running Linux Mint and I have the puzzle presented above.

From what I gather, I'm using rename (1p) which makes mention of Perl and in the man page it says it will also run as file-rename. I'm not sure if this is the right rename utility for the common argument

s/old_pattern/new_pattern/

but any time I try to run anything (including -n), I just get an angle bracket > and have to ctrl-c out.

I'd also need some details on how the wildcards work, which seems to be lacking in the documentation.

Edit: Instructions unclear. I have a bunch of episodes that are very wordy. I'm moving them onto DVD and truncated on my player the directory will look like:

Star Trek The Next Gene....
Star Trek The Next Gene....
Star Trek The Next Gene....
Star Trek The Next Gene....
Star Trek The Next Gene....

so I want to take (sample episode)

Star Trek The Next Generation Season 1 Episode 1 - Encounter at Far Point

and

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

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

  • Keep episode title as is.

So it looks like

S01E01 - Encounter at Farpoint.mkv

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[–] [S] 6 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Cool! Thanks!

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

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago*

    Perl has its own man pages, like commands do, but specifically for Perl stuff!

    There's also a "perldoc" command that works a lot like man, that documents the functions and things.

    For this, check out perldoc -f s (the s "function") and man perlretut (regular expressions). MagnificentSteiner here is using /e on the end of the regex to write Perl code in the replacement instead of a string (that's mentioned in the perlre man page), and then using the sprintf function to do some formatting, which, perldoc -f sprintf.

    For a general intro to Perl, man perlintro!

    ... Oh, uh, you may need to install the perl-doc package (or equivalent) to have any of this documentation.

    -- Frost

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    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

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