But your for; do ... ;done line was a quite a surprise, because I didn’t know the ‘basename NAME [SUFFIX]‘ trick. This is really cool, and is much cleaner this way!

Thanks a lot!

I should point you there’s a “basename” command which gives you the file’s name without the extension, so no need to do echo/tr trickery.
One web page I just googled shows it as:

for old in *.avi; do mv “$old” “`basename $old .avi`.mpg”; done

You can work also with filenames containing spaces if you put double quotes in proper places (I added them in the above).

move *.avi *.mpg

The bash solution for me atm is still:

for I in $(ls *.avi)
do
WITHOUTH_AVI=$(echo $I | tr -d ".avi$")
mv $I "$WITHOUT_AVI".mpg;
done

and in this example must not be SPACES in the filename.

Does anybody have another soltion?

Line 7 be like this (I hope this works now):

@ARGV = <STDIN>;

Personally, I’m using something I picked out of a Perl book examples a long time ago, and called it “rename” not surprisingly. It does require you’re familiar with (perl) regular expressions; if you’re not, then this is probably not for you.

Your example would be done like this:

rename ’s/\[.*\]//’ *.mp3

(with s/ … / … / being the substitute operation).

Here’s the perl code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

($op = shift) || die "Usage: rename perlexpr [filenames]\n";
if (!@ARGV) {
@ARGV = ;
chop(@ARGV);
}
$filenum = 0;
for (@ARGV) {
$filenum++;
$was = $_;
eval $op;
die $@ if $@;
rename($was,$_) unless $was eq $_;
}