Renaming files with Bash, removing prefix and suffix

Another approach, for fun, using regular expressions:

regex='prefix - (.*) - suffix.txt'for f in *.txt; do    [[ $f =~ $regex ]] && mv "$f" "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}.txt"done

Actually, using the simple pattern '*.txt' here has two problems:

1. It's too broad; you may need to apply the regex to a lot of non-matching files.
2. If there are a lot of files in the current directory, the command line could overflow.

Using find complicates the procedure, but is more correct:

find . -maxdepth 1 -regex 'prefix - .* - suffix.txt' -print0 | \  while read -d '' -r; do   [[ $REPLY =~ $regex ]] && mv "$REPLY" "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}.txt"  done

If you have access to GNU sed, you could use some regex to perform something like:

for i in *.txt; do mv "$i" "$(echo $i | sed -r 's/([^-]*)\s-\s(.*)\s-\s([^-]*)\.txt/\2.txt/')"; done

you could use this:

find . -name "*.txt" -print0 | awk -v RS="\0" -v ORS="\0" '{print $0;sub(/^prefix - /,""); sub(/ - suffix.txt$/,".txt"); print $0; }' | xargs -0 -n 2 mv

which could be written more clearly as:

find . -name "*.txt" -print0 |awk -v RS="\0" -v ORS="\0" '{  print $0;  sub(/^prefix - /,"");   sub(/ - suffix.txt$/,".txt");   print $0;}' |xargs -0 -n 2 mv