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supertonic

macrumors member
Original poster
May 5, 2010
60
0
Have hundreds of folders with a 3-digit numbers at the end like this:

sun101
moon light347
earth is round209


Folder names vary in length but there is always a 3-digit number at the end.


Need to remove the 3 numbers at the end & insert them in the beginning like this:

101sun
347moon light
209earth is round


Is it possible to do this in Terminal?


thanks much
 

subsonix

macrumors 68040
Feb 2, 2008
3,551
79
It's possible, but where are the folders located? You can make a script that match the form you described then rename it. You can then use that script in a loop over a folder of files and folders. Just keep in mind that commands such as mv are destructive so you want to make sure that you test such a script and make sure you understand what it does.
 

kaydell.leavitt

macrumors regular
Apr 19, 2010
100
0
Matching Patterns in the Unix Command Line

My first thought would be to list the files with:

ls

http://learnbymac.com/doc/unix/bsd/ls.man.html

and then do pattern matching with

grep

http://learnbymac.com/doc/unix/bsd/grep.man.html

In a command such as the following:

ls -R | grep '^.*\d\d\d$'

This is just to start giving you an idea. The following expression:

'^.*\d\d\d$'

is called a "regular expression". Regular expressions are used for pattern-matching and for splitting things into pieces.

In this regular expression the '^' character specifies the beginning of the file or folder name, followed any ".*" which means any number of any characters, and then "\d\d\d" specifies exactly three digits and finally "$" specifies the end of the file name.

This command:

ls -R | grep '^.*\d\d\d$'

isn't exactly finished, but I wanted to give you an idea and something to google for (i.e. "split" and "regular expression").

Other useful commands may be

sed, awk, csplit

I'm looking for people to teach Mac programming to. The service is free, I just want to get ideas for my web tutorials on my website.

-- Kaydell
kaydell@yahoo.com
http://learnmacprogramming.com
 

subsonix

macrumors 68040
Feb 2, 2008
3,551
79
Code:
#!/bin/bash

# match the pattern
ORIGINALNAME=$(echo "$1" | grep -P "^[A-z ]+\d{3}$")

# if it doesn't match, quit
if [ -z "$ORIGINALNAME" ]
then
    exit 1
fi

# if it's not a directory, quit
if [ "$(file -ib "$1")" != "directory" ]
then
    exit 2
fi


# separate the numeric suffix from the name
SUFFIX=$(echo "$1" | grep -oP "\d{3}$")
NAME=$(echo "$1" | grep -oP "^[A-z ]+")

# reverse the order
NEWNAME="$SUFFIX""$NAME"

# test the result
echo "$NEWNAME"

This will match the name of folders and print out the new name, to use it in a folder you can do like this:

Code:
for i in * ; do ./thescript.sh "$i" ; done
 

sero

macrumors member
Aug 28, 2008
91
14
oneliner
Code:
for i in $(ls -p|grep "/"|rev|cut -c2-|rev|sed s/\ /_/g);do thr=$(echo "$i"|rev|cut -c1-3|rev); rest=$(echo "$i"|rev|cut -c4- |rev); mv "$(echo "$i"|sed s/_/\ /g)" "$(echo ${thr}${rest}|sed s/_/\ /g)";done
 

supertonic

macrumors member
Original poster
May 5, 2010
60
0
Thanks for all your suggestions. I couldn't get any of these solutions to work & finally figured out some folder names started with underscore "_" . After removing those, these solutions worked.

thanks again
 
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