Mastodawn

Rename “Star Trek Next Generation Season 1 Episode 1 - Encounter at Farpoint.mkv” to “S01E01 - Encounter at Far Point.mkv” etc.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/61240259

Rename “Star Trek Next Generation Season 1 Episode 1 - Encounter at Farpoint.mkv” to “S01E01 - Encounter at Far Point.mkv” etc. - sh.itjust.works

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.

schipelblorp Jun 3

Re-phrased the title. It’s a plain language question.

schipelblorp Jun 3

I’ll look into it. I’m going to be running a media server eventually, so thinking learning the command line arguments would be a good investment.

In this case, I’m moving these onto DVD and the truncated file names will all look the same on the DVD player, so I need to shorten 24*7 files.

thr0w4w4y2 Jun 3

what’s the outcome you’re trying to achieve? you’ve got a folder full of mkv files and you just want to rename them?

why not keep it simple and use a for loop with mv and awk to perform the rename?

schipelblorp Jun 3

Because I need to preserve the Season and Episode information.

Replace 'Star Trek The Next Generation Season ’ with ‘S0’

Replace 'Episode ’ with ‘E0’ or ‘E’ depending on digits

Keep episode title as is.

schipelblorp Jun 3

editted for clarity. thanks. I have a bad habit of not providing context. underdeveloped theory of mind.

mv

mmv

mv “Star Trek Next Generation Season 1 Episode 1 - Encounter at Farpoint.mkv” “S01E01 - Encounter at Far Point.mkv”

Or am I missing something about what you’re trying to do?

I think he wants to rename more than one file. Sounds like he wants to rename entire folders using that formula.

schipelblorp Jun 3

Yes, the “etc.” part. Imagine I have 7*24 episodes following this convention. How do I rename them all in one swell foop?

zero_spelled_with_an_ecks Jun 3

find command with an exec. Basically, find can list files matching a pattern and then run a command for each of them. The exec will probably be a bit gnarly, though, so if you want something a little more palatable, you want a script that grabs the names of the files into a variable, then takes each entry via a for loop (find command and a bash while read might work), stores it in a variable, changes it based on your pattern (sed might work here), stores the changed name in another variable and then mv $former-name $new-name

If the naming of each series is that consistent, you could just drop the title into a positional array in bash and build the new title out of it in a string and then do the rename, in a loop. It would be a very short shell script.

This doesn’t answer your question at all, so my apologies up front.

I’m not at all intending to advertise here, and I’m not at all affiliated with them, but in the past, I’ve sidestepped having to write scripts by using FileBot. It’s always just worked for me.

Successful_Try543 Jun 3

To me, your problem feels like the command you’re trying to execute isn’t complete syntax-wise. It may be useful if you’d quote the actual command you’re trying to execute.

I think you want something like this:

$ ls 'Star Trek Next Generation Season 01 Episode 22 - Bob.mkv' 'Star Trek Next Generation Season 1 Episode 1 - Encounter at Farpoint.mkv' $ file-rename 's/.*Season (\d+) Episode (\d+)/sprintf("S%02dE%02d", $1, $2)/ie' *.mkv $ ls 'S01E01 - Encounter at Farpoint.mkv' 'S01E22 - Bob.mkv'

If you are getting an angle bracket, it’s probably because you didn’t add *.mkv at the end.

schipelblorp Jun 3

Thanks! I’ll dig into this tonight. The man page could use a bit of work, too, if you’re feeling generous. A lot is assumed to be known.

Barbarian Jun 3

It’s so short because it’s special-purpose rather than general purpose. Perl is a programming language that can do lots and lots of different things. file-rename does one thing, and one thing very well: it renames files

plantsmakemehappy Jun 3

Share the rename commands you’ve tried

This is the kinda small script I use Claude for. So yeh, it’s LLM generated. Downvote away.
But I am terrible at writing bash scripts!

#!/usr/bin/env bash # rename-episodes.sh — run inside the folder, or pass a directory as $1 shopt -s nullglob cd "${1:-.}" || exit 1 for f in *.mkv; do # Match: ... Season N ... Episode N - Title.mkv if [[ $f =~ Season\ ([0-9]+)\ Episode\ ([0-9]+)\ -\ (.+)\.mkv$ ]]; then season="${BASH_REMATCH[1]}" episode="${BASH_REMATCH[2]}" title="${BASH_REMATCH[3]}" # Zero-pad to two digits new=$(printf "S%02dE%02d - %s.mkv" "$season" "$episode" "$title") if [[ "$f" != "$new" ]]; then echo "mv: $f -> $new" # uncomment the next line to actually move the file # mv -n -- "$f" "$new" fi else echo "skip (no match): $f" fi done

I’ve commented out the mv command so you can test/fiddle/play around with it without clobbering your files.

Some notes from Claude:

Two practical notes:
If your files aren’t all .mkv, change the glob (*.mkv) and the regex anchor accordingly, or loop over *.{mkv,mp4,avi}.
This assumes the literal words “Season” and “Episode” appear. If your real filenames vary (e.g. “S1”, “1x01”, “Ep 1”), the regex needs adjusting

MagnificentSteiner Jun 3

Tested this with perl-rename and it seems to work fine:

prename -n ‘s/.* (\d{1,2}).* (\d{1,2})/sprintf “S%02dE%02d”,$1,$2/e’

schipelblorp Jun 3

Cool! Thanks!

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

MagnificentSteiner Jun 3

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 ;)

forestbeasts Jun 5

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!

– Frost

SiblingNoah Jun 3

I recommend using a tool designed just for this: https://www.tweaking4all.com/home-theatre/rename-my-tv-series-v2/

Tweaking4All.com - Rename My TV Series 2

A tool to quickly and easily rename silly named TV Show episodes file name to a format that makes sense and is to your liking (Windows, MacOS and Linux).

Tweaking4All.com

For anyone looking for a GUI tool I like to use krename.

triplenadir Jun 4

github.com/jkwill87/mnamer

GitHub - jkwill87/mnamer: media file renaming and organizing tool

media file renaming and organizing tool. Contribute to jkwill87/mnamer development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub