Extract certain parts of a string

Dynadrate · 04-05-2009, 08:53 PM

Hi there!
I'm new to linux, but quite motivated!

I have following Problem: There are video-files which I'd like to be sorted into directories.
At the moment, there is one huge directory:

TV.Show.foo.S01E02.Title.avi
TV.Show.foo.S02E08.Title.avi
TV.Show.bar.S03E14.Title.avi
TV.Show.bar.S07E01.Title.avi
...and so on.

I stumbled upon regular expressions, but i'm not sure wheter this technique can help me. For my understanding, the files have a pattern in the Season-Episode part of the filename (S**E**). So, everthing ahead of this should be returned and with this it would be easy to mkdir a directory and put the files in it. It would be even better if the dots would be removed, but that's not necessary.

It's not that i want anybody to do my research, i just want to know if i'm on the right way with regular expressions to achieve this. RegEx seem to be quite advanced, and i don't want to run into something which doesn't help me after all

I'm working on a NSLU2 with unslung, a special distro for this device. I have to add, that i can only use shell at the moment.

Thank you very much!

shakezilla · 04-05-2009, 10:35 PM

Yes, regular expressions are probably the way you want to go. If you're looking to get the TV show name for each file, I think you could use something like this in perl:

Code:

my %destDir= ();

foreach my $filename (@allFilenames)
{
    $filename =~ m/^(.*)\.S\d\dE\d\d\..*\.avi$/;
    $destDir[$filename]= $1;
}

Please note, my perl is VERY rusty, so this may not be right. Also, this code assumes that every file name you'll be looking at follows the same pattern that you wrote in your post. Otherwise, things get more complicated. Other tools to work with regular expressions are sed and awk.

As always, test it before you actually move the files.