Removing characters from beginning of multiple files

UNIX for Beginners Q & A
1

Hi,

I have been searching how to do this but I can't seem to find how to do it. Hopefully someone can help.

I have multiplr files, 100's example 12345-zxys.213423.zyz.txt. I want to be able to take all these files and remove the first '12345-' from each of the files. '12345-' these characters are uniqe on each file but of the same length.

I would appreciate if someone can help.

Thanks in advance.

Regards
Israr

2

Please post what have you tried, where are you struck.

Here is a sample.

ls 12345-zxys.213423.zyz.txt | while read file
do
newfilename=`echo $file | sed 's/^.*-//'`
mv $file $newfilename
done
1 Like
3

hi matrixmadhan,

Thank you so much for quick response. If I run this will it only do fir single file or will it for the batch?

4

I have added sample script for a single file, please change it to multiple files like

ls file*

Please give it a try and let us know if there are any problems.

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5

Yes thats worked exactly as I wanted. so I replaced ls file* with ls *.txt. For benefit of many who have not used sed command and learning. can you please break the command down?

Many thx

6

You might want to consider shell's parameter expansion (no external cammnd like sed necessary):

for FN in *.txt; do echo mv $FN ${FN#*-}; done
1 Like