Question

I’d like to rename some files that are all in the same directory. The file name pattern used is Prefix_ddmmyy.tex with a european date format. For the sake of readability and the ordering I’d like to rename the files in a pattern Prefix_yymmdd.tex with a canonical date format.

Anyone ideas how I can do this automatically for a complete directory? My sed and regexp knowledge is not very sharp…

Answer 1

for file in Prefix_*.tex ; do file_new=echo '$file' | sed -e 's:\([0-9][0-9]\)\([0-9][0-9]\)\([0-9][0-9]\)\(\.tex\):\3\2\1\4:' test ‘$file’ != ‘$file_new’ && mv -f ‘$file’ ‘$file_new’ done

Or, if you have a lot of files and/or want to process files recursively, replace:

for file in Prefix_*.tex ; do 

with:

find . -name Prefix_*.tex -print | while read file ; do 

or (non-recursive, GNU):

find . -maxtdepth 1 -name Prefix_*.tex -print | while read file ; do