how to remove characters between square brackets of file names.

[rupeshforu3]

Hi I am Rupesh from India and I have Fedora 36 Linux and some files which consists of files with names consisting of square brackets and some text in between. I want to remove these square brackets including text.

Recently I have downloaded youtube videos using yt-dlp which is youtube downloader in Linux and succeeded but its file name has the following form.

This is youtube video [abcdefg-].mp4

Here in the above file name "This is youtube video" is the title of YouTube video and abcdefg- is the id for that youtube video. mp4 is the video file extension.

Now I want to remove characters between square brackets including square brackets ie., [abcdefg-]. Here before square brackets space character is present and I want to remove it also.

Finally I want file with name as "This is youtube video.mp4".

I have 100s of files as above.

I have searched web and found some sed commands but failed.Please try to suggest how to remove characters between brackets including square brackets from file name.

Regards,
Rupesh.

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[khalil1210]

You can use bulk rename utility

When you use the "crop" option, you have the option of specifying a "special" value using the wildcard (*).
This will remove the specified string, and any characters occupied by the wildcard.
So for example, specifying [*] would convert "Hello[ABC] Joe" to just "Hello Joe", as it has removed the two square brackets and everything between.

Source: Bulk Rename Utility • View topic - Remove all ( ) and characters within

 

[rupeshforu3]

The problem has been solved in Linux itself without any other software.

The code is

for x in *.mp4; do mv "$x" "${x// \[*\]/}"; done

Does this code works same for all situations I mean in the same way ie., just removing characters between square brackets and nothing else like deleting other characters in file name etc.,.

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[Zangetsu]

^^You can search for batch scripts in Linux. Which will take directory path as input and will rename all files as per rules defined in it.

*ostechnix.com/how-to-rename-multiple-files-at-once-in-linux/

*linuxhint.com/rename_files_linux/

 

[Desmond]

The problem has been solved in Linux itself without any other software.

The code is

for x in *.mp4; do mv "$x" "${x// \[*\]/}"; done

Does this code works same for all situations I mean in the same way ie., just removing characters between square brackets and nothing else like deleting other characters in file name etc.,.

Sent from my LM-G710 using Tapatalk

Are you sure this is working for you? It doesn't seem to be working on my machine.

I have used this instead and it works as expected:

rename 's/(.+)\[.*\](.*)$/$1$2/' *.txt

Output for reference:

desmond@stigmata2:~/temp$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-rw-r-- 1 desmond desmond 0 Jun 13 19:21 'test1[234].txt'
-rw-rw-r-- 1 desmond desmond 0 Jun 13 19:24 'test[123].txt'
desmond@stigmata2:~/temp$ rename 's/(.+)\[.*\](.*)$/$1$2/' *.txt
desmond@stigmata2:~/temp$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-rw-r-- 1 desmond desmond 0 Jun 13 19:24 test.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 desmond desmond 0 Jun 13 19:21 test1.txt
desmond@stigmata2:~/temp$

Edit:

Contrast with the for loop method you posted:

desmond@stigmata2:~/temp$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-rw-r-- 1 desmond desmond 0 Jun 13 19:24 'test1[234].txt'
-rw-rw-r-- 1 desmond desmond 0 Jun 13 19:31 'test[123].txt'
desmond@stigmata2:~/temp$ for x in *.txt; do mv "$x" "${x// \[*\]/}"; done
mv: 'test1[234].txt' and 'test1[234].txt' are the same file
mv: 'test[123].txt' and 'test[123].txt' are the same file
desmond@stigmata2:~/temp$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-rw-r-- 1 desmond desmond 0 Jun 13 19:24 'test1[234].txt'
-rw-rw-r-- 1 desmond desmond 0 Jun 13 19:31 'test[123].txt'
desmond@stigmata2:~/temp$