I need another set of eyes to tell me what's wrong with this pipe and sed

Question

Again I am trying to rename some video files, and again I am having problems with my command. If I could get another set of eyes to look at this and figure out what i'm not seeing I would be grateful.

I have files like this;

'DARK Matter S01E03 Episode Three.mp4'

'DARK Matter S01E04 Episode Four.mp4'

etc...

I am trying to remove the " Episode Three", " Episode Four" etc from the names and I wrote this command, but it's not quite working as expected.

for file in *Episode*;do echo "rename \"$file\" "\"$file" | sed 's/ Episode*./.')";done

The result of this command is;

rename "DARK Matter S01E03 Episode Three.mp4" "DARK Matter S01E03 Episode Three.mp4 | sed 's/ Episode*./.')
rename "DARK Matter S01E04 Episode Four.mp4" "DARK Matter S01E04 Episode Four.mp4 | sed 's/ Episode*./.')
rename "DARK Matter S01E05 Episode Five.mp4" "DARK Matter S01E05 Episode Five.mp4 | sed 's/ Episode*./.')

It's not recognizing the pipe to sed and my sed command itself is not written correctly (I know, i'm terrible with regular expressions). I would appreciate any help you could give.

Answer 1

I figured it out myself finally;

for file in *Episode*;do echo "rename \"$file\" \"$file\"" | sed 's/ Episode[^.]*//2';done

rename "DARK Matter S01E03 Episode Three.mp4" "DARK Matter S01E03.mp4"

rename "DARK Matter S01E04 Episode Four.mp4" "DARK Matter S01E04.mp4"

rename "DARK Matter S01E05 Episode Five.mp4" "DARK Matter S01E05.mp4"

Answer 2

Using a regex and pulling the matching pieces from the BASH_REMATCH[] array:

regex='(.*) Episode [^.]+(.*)'

for file in *Episode*
do
    if [[ "${file}" =~ $regex ]]
    then
        # typeset -p BASH_REMATCH
        newfile="${BASH_REMATCH[1]}${BASH_REMATCH[2]}"
        cp "${file}" "${newfile}"
    fi
done

NOTES:

• the regex is defined to pickup anything after the first period (eg, .mp4, .mkv, some.other.suffix)
• uncomment the typeset -p command to display the contents of the BASH_REMATCH[] array
• replace cp with mv once the results have been verified

Assuming the following files:

$ ls -l *Dark*
-rw-rw----+ 1 username None 0 Feb 23 20:02 DARK\ Matter\ S01E03\ Episode\ Three.mp4
-rw-rw----+ 1 username None 0 Feb 23 20:02 DARK\ Matter\ S01E04\ Episode\ Four.mp4
-rw-rw----+ 1 username None 0 Feb 23 20:03 DARK\ Matter\ S01E05\ Episode\ Five.mkv

The code results in the following:

$ ls -l DARK*
-rw-rw----+ 1 username None 0 Feb 23 20:02 DARK\ Matter\ S01E03\ Episode\ Three.mp4
-rw-rw----+ 1 username None 0 Feb 23 20:08 DARK\ Matter\ S01E03.mp4
-rw-rw----+ 1 username None 0 Feb 23 20:02 DARK\ Matter\ S01E04\ Episode\ Four.mp4
-rw-rw----+ 1 username None 0 Feb 23 20:08 DARK\ Matter\ S01E04.mp4
-rw-rw----+ 1 username None 0 Feb 23 20:03 DARK\ Matter\ S01E05\ Episode\ Five.mkv
-rw-rw----+ 1 username None 0 Feb 23 20:08 DARK\ Matter\ S01E05.mkv