bash - Rename multiple files while keeping the same extension on Linux

Question

I have 100s of files in a directory with the following naming convention.

00XYZCD042ABCDE20141002ABCDE.XML
00XYZCC011ABCDE20141002.TXT
00XYZCB165ABCDE20141002ABCDE.TXT
00XYZCB165ABCDE20141002ABCDE.CSV

I want to rename these files using bash, awk, cut, sed, so that I get the output:

XYZCD042.XML
XYZCC011.TXT
XYZCB165.TXT
XYZCB165.CSV

So basically, remove the first two 0s always, and then keep everything until ABCDE starts and then remove everything including ABCDE and keep the file extension.

Answer 1

You could try the below rename command,

rename 's/ABCDE.*(..*)/$1/;s/^00//' *

Explanation:

• s/ABCDE.*(..*)/$1/ Matches all the characters from the first ABCDE upto the last and captures only the extension part. Then all the matched chars are replaced with that captured extension.
• s/^00// Then this would remove the leading two zeros.