[SOLVED] Understanding rename/sprintf

snowman81 · 02-26-2021, 01:30 PM

I'm having trouble understanding the following statement. I am renaming a directory of files which are episodes of a TV show where the format is The.Blah.Season.01.Episode.01.-.Pilot.mp4

The line I am using is this

Code:

rename -n -- 's/.*(\d+).*(\d+)/sprintf "S%02dE%02d.mp4", $1, $2/e' *.mp4

So the -n is a dry run and doesn't make a change. The

Code:

s/.*(\d+).*(\d+)

looks like it's using sed and a regex that finds the first and second occurrence of digits. The last part just does all these actions on any mp4 in the directory. The middle bit about sprintf I know controls the season/episode numbers but I'm getting confused when I try to look it up. Is the C version different from Java and so on?

When I run the command it looks like it sequentially increases the season number and the episode number is wrong. That first file shows up as S01E04.mp4

A) I don't understand where the part is that makes the season number increase.

and

B) Is there a way to keep the show name and episode name and only have the season and episode number show up as xxx.S01.E01.xxx

Turbocapitalist · 02-26-2021, 01:42 PM

It is a perl script and any perl-based regular expression or even any normal perl expression can be processed.

So, it's not getting incremented, the \d+ is getting fetched from a different part of the file name than you think. The .* is greedy, and thus the 4 in the mp4 is $2 in your pattern.

Code:

touch The.Blah.Season.01.Episode.03.-.Pilot.mp5
rename -n -- 's/.*(\d+).*(\d+)/sprintf "S%02dE%02d.mp4", $1, $2/e' *.mp5

snowman81 · 02-26-2021, 03:22 PM

I appreciate your help and you were totally correct. To be honest, I was waaaay overthinking the issue. I ended up doing it like this:

Code:

rename -n -- 's/eason\.//g' *.mp4
rename -n -- 's/pisode\.//g' *.mp4