Question

I was trying to do some quick filename cleanup at the shell (zsh, if it matters). Renaming files. (I’m using cp instead of mv just to be safe)

foreach f (\#*.ogg)
  cp $f `echo $f | perl -pe 's/\#\d+ (.+)$/"\1"/'`
end

Now, I know there are tools to do stuff like this, but for personal interest I’m wondering how I can do it this way. Right now, I get an error:

cp: target `When.ogg"' is not a directory

Where ‘When.ogg’ is the last part of the filename. I’ve tried adding quotes (see above) and escaping the spaces, but nonetheless this is what I get.

Is there a reason I can’t use the output of s perl pmr=;omrt as the final argument to another command line tool?

Answer 1

This is what you need in bash, hope it’s good for zsh too.

cp "$f" "`echo $f | perl -pe 's/\#\d+ (.+)$/\1/'`"

If the filename contains spaces, you also have quote the second argument of cp.