How to Rename “Star Trek Next Generation Season 1 Episode 1 - Encounter at Farpoint.mkv” to “S01E01 - Encounter at Far Point.mkv” etc.? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works to c/linux4noobs@programming.dev

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Hi, y'all. Running Linux Mint and I have the puzzle presented above.

From what I gather, I'm using rename (1p) which makes mention of Perl and in the man page it says it will also run as file-rename. I'm not sure if this is the right rename utility for the common argument

s/old_pattern/new_pattern/

but any time I try to run anything (including -n), I just get an angle bracket > and have to ctrl-c out.

I'd also need some details on how the wildcards work, which seems to be lacking in the documentation.

Edit: Instructions unclear. I have a bunch of episodes that are very wordy. I'm moving them onto DVD and truncated on my player the directory will look like:

Star Trek The Next Gene....
Star Trek The Next Gene....
Star Trek The Next Gene....
Star Trek The Next Gene....
Star Trek The Next Gene....

so I want to take (sample episode)

Star Trek The Next Generation Season 1 Episode 1 - Encounter at Far Point

and

Replace 'Star Trek The Next Generation Season ' with 'S0'
Replace 'Episode ' with 'E0' or 'E' depending on digits
Keep episode title as is.

So it looks like

S01E01 - Encounter at Farpoint.mkv

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[-] teft@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago

I think he wants to rename more than one file. Sounds like he wants to rename entire folders using that formula.

this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026

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