Removing Middle Characters From File Name in Bash

Question

I'm new to text handling in bash and have hundreds of files with varying names:

TS_01_001_21.0.tif
TS_10_005_-21.0.tif
TS_21_010_-45.0.tif

I want to remove the middle section and the extension so the files look like:

TS_01_21.0
TS_10_-21.0
TS_21_-45.0

So far I have:

for f in *.tif;do 
   mv "${f}" "${f%.tif}"
done

To remove the extension, but I can't figure out how to remove the middle three characters. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

what should happen if you have filenames like TS_01_001_21.0.tif and TS_01_002_21.0.tif ? — jhnc
– jhnc, Commented Oct 24, 2022 at 21:05
For such complex name transformations, you are perhaps fastest, if you use the bash regex operator, which can not only match a tring for having a certain structure, but also extract parts of the string. It is described in the bash man-page in the section Compound Commands, under the command [[ expression ]]. In addition, I would consider using the option -i for mv. — user1934428
– user1934428, Commented Oct 25, 2022 at 9:35

markp-fuso · Accepted Answer · 2022-10-24 21:08:36Z

1

Assumptions:

middle always means 3 digits plus an underscore (_)
there is only the one (aka middle) occurrence of 3 digits plus an underscore (_)
the extension is always .tif

One idea using a pair of parameter substitutions to remove the unwanted characters:

for f in TS_01_001_21.0.tif TS_10_005_-21.0.tif TS_21_010_-45.0.tif
do
    newf="${f//[0-9][0-9][0-9]_/}"
    newf="${newf/.tif/}"
    if [[ -f "${newf}" ]] 
    then
        # addressing comment/question re: what happens if two source files are modified to generate the same new file name
        echo "WARNING: ${newf} already exists. [ source: ${f} ]"
    else
        echo mv "${f}" "${newf}"
    fi
done

This generates:

mv TS_01_001_21.0.tif TS_01_21.0
mv TS_10_005_-21.0.tif TS_10_-21.0
mv TS_21_010_-45.0.tif TS_21_-45.0

Once satisfied with the result OP can remove the echo in order to perform the actual file renames.

edited Oct 24, 2022 at 21:08

answered Oct 24, 2022 at 19:33

markp-fuso

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