Am looking for a script that will batch rename a folder containing music files I have converted from wma to ogg, the converted ogg files have a name like trackname.wma.ogg. I have seen scripts that will take off the extension or the beginning of a file name but nothing about the center portion. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

One way to do it would be to use awk (but there may be better ways):

file='stuff.wma.ogg'
newfile=`echo $file | awk -F '.' '{print $1 "." $3}'`

You just need to wrap that in a loop, e.g.

This is the syntax for Bash, by the way. See this if you want to learn more about Bash scripting.

The above works if you're in the directory with the files, will change all files ending in ogg.

Am running a Centos 5.3 which doesn't have the rename cmd enabled "I have tried it" as a lot of scripts on the net use it. I will try the first script and see if I can make it work.

You could simply use
mv "${file}" "${file%.wma.ogg}.ogg"

This removes ".wma.ogg" and adds the .ogg back.

You can also use
mv "${file}" "${file/.wma.ogg/.ogg}"

Suppose that you want a more general solution that keeps the first part, and the last part, regardless of the extensions used:
mv "${file}" "${file%%.*}.${file##*.}"

If you can use variable expansion instead of an external program, you may find dramatic speed increases.
Especially since you want to execute it inside a loop.

Thank you everyone for your replies worked like a charm the scripts work great. This is what makes linux great.

The perl installation in Debian and related distros (and maybe some others, I'm not sure which ones have it and which don't) includes a rename utility that has a syntax like sed. So if you have it installed you can run:

rename 's/.wma.ogg/.ogg/' *


There are also several gui and cli batch-renaming programs available, such as krename, gprename, mrename, pyrenamer, to name a few I found listed in apt.

One neat package I've found is called renameutils. One of the included programs is "qmv", which will load a group of filenames into a text editor so you can manually alter all of them at once, and when you save the text it will rename everything according to the changes you made.


Most tagging tools for audio files also include a renaming feature. I usually use easytag myself, for instance, and you can do string substitutions on the filename with it.


In general though, in scripts the parameter substitution technique detailed by jschiwal is the most efficient for command-line use, it being a bash built-in function. You can use it in any command, not just mv, so it might be possible to use it directly in whatever command or script you're using for the original conversion, for example.

Hi David am still new to bash scripting so I will try and work it into the conversion script and see if I can run it all at once. Actually that is starting to sound like such a nice idea I can't wait to try it out, as I was having to run the scripts separately. I will also try it with other commands too, thank for your suggestions.