How to remove square brackets, any text inside, and space after & before the brackets?

Question

I have a lot of photos that need to be renamed.

[Wedding] Happy Day_001 [February].jpg
[Mountain] Summer Camp_165 [May].jpg
[Beach] Music Fest_58 [August].jpg

I need all the square brackets to be removed. To do so, I found this & this.

Using sed command as in those pages, the space before and after the brackets is still there. In my case, I want the text inside, space before & after, and the brackets itself to be removed.

Happy Day_001.jpg  
Summer Camp_165.jpg  
Music Fest_58.jpg

To remove [first]　 & 　[last] brackets, how can I do that with a sed command?

Do you have the metadata (Wedding, Mountain, Beach, ...) as keywords in jpg files? It might be a good idea to update the EXIF first and only then rename the file. — Eric Duminil, Oct 23 '17 at 11:59
Possible duplicate of How to easily rename files using command line? — David Foerster, Oct 23 '17 at 14:56

score 9 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 12 '20 at 14:37

9

You shouldn't use sed to rename files, but you can use the Perl program rename, for example:

$ rename -n 's/\[[^]]+\] ([^[]+) \[[^]]+\]/$1/' *
rename([Beach] Music Fest_58 [August].jpg, Music Fest_58.jpg)
rename([Mountain] Summer Camp_165 [May].jpg, Summer Camp_165.jpg)
rename([Wedding] Happy Day_001 [February].jpg, Happy Day_001.jpg)

Remove -n after testing to actually rename the files.

Notes

s/old/new replace old with new
\[ literal [
[^[]+ some characters that are not [
(stuff) save stuff for later to reference as $1, $2 etc

This only works if your filenames are consistent. muru's answer is much more portable.

edited Jun 12 '20 at 14:37

Community

1

answered Oct 23 '17 at 09:20

Zanna

70,465

It works! Thank you. It has many brackets that I don't understand. Maybe can you give me a reference about it to read? – Hidayats Oct 23 '17 at 10:34
Some of the brackets are literal and some are used for character classes (here just for negation with ^). I explained a little in my notes. Here's a small summary of Perl regex which links to a bigger one. But the regex I use here is the same for sed and grep so the regex sections in info sed, for example, may help @SandiHidayat – Zanna Oct 23 '17 at 10:47
Good ol' rename, love it – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Oct 24 '17 at 03:22

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 23 '17 at 09:19

7

sed is the wrong tool. It doesn't rename files. While you can pair it with something that can, it's simpler to use rename from Perl:

rename -n 's/\[.*?\]//g' *

With -n, rename will show what changes will be made. Run without -n to actually rename the files. rename is Perl, and in Perl, .*? is not a greedy match like .*, so you don't need to use tricks like [^]]*.

To remove surrounding whitespace as well:

rename -n 's/\s*\[.*?\]\s*//g' *

answered Oct 23 '17 at 09:19

muru

197,895
55
485
740

Ah, you're right. That's why I got an error. It's trying to edit the file itself rather than changing its name. I never used sed or rename before since mv is enough for me.Your answer is what i was looking for. It works perfectly! Thank you very much. – Hidayats Oct 23 '17 at 10:22

How to remove square brackets, any text inside, and space after & before the brackets?

2 Answers2

Notes