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 3 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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[-] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 days ago

Cool! Thanks!

Is this standard PERL stuff? How I learn what all these things mean? One day I hope to write my own arguments.

[-] forestbeasts@pawb.social 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Perl has its own man pages, like commands do, but specifically for Perl stuff!

There's also a "perldoc" command that works a lot like man, that documents the functions and things.

For this, check out perldoc -f s (the s "function") and man perlretut (regular expressions). MagnificentSteiner here is using /e on the end of the regex to write Perl code in the replacement instead of a string (that's mentioned in the perlre man page), and then using the sprintf function to do some formatting, which, perldoc -f sprintf.

For a general intro to Perl, man perlintro!

... Oh, uh, you may need to install the perl-doc package (or equivalent) to have any of this documentation.

-- Frost

[-] MagnificentSteiner@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

No idea lol

I just wanted a rename utility and Arch didn't have the GUI one I used on Mint so I gradually pieced some of this stuff together. If there's one source online that lays it all out I haven't found it yet!

If you'd like me to explain the one here I'll do my best ;)

Edit: nvm, I edited the original comment to explain everything

this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026

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