Based on the comment posted by a visitor on How to remove first/last character from a string using SED article, I decided to create this simple example in which I will remove the first three characters from each file from a filelist.

Removing the first three characters from each file from a filelist

$ touch kkt.asdf $ touch tre.gsew $ touch oir.acr $ ls -a kkt.asdf        oir.acr         tre.gsew

 At this point, the files are created in the curent working directory. Following command will list all files and, for each file, a new variable ($file_new) will take the value of the name of the file, without the last three characters:

$ ls | while read file; do file_new=`echo "$file" | sed 's/...\(.*\)/\1/g'`; mv "$file" "$file_new"; done

 and now, that all files were renamed (moved) so that the first three characters were removed:

$ ls -a .       ..      .acr    .asdf   .gsew

(the order has changed because it is alphabetical)

P.S.: I advise you to test this before you try it AND carefull if you run it as root (and where you run it).

P.S.2: it can be modified so that it handles files in other directory than CWD and it can also be modified to remove the last three...four... characters.

Bookmarks:

Echo "How to cut out first last n characters from each file name, from a filelist" around:

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