Bash script to rename files excluding names in array

Question

I currently have a script where I rename files by removing whitespace and certain names. This is about 200 names so far so I though an array of names I want to exclude would be a better option.

prename -v 's/ /_/g' *

prename -v 's/_-_/_/g' *

prename -v 's/_\(Summer-HD\)//ig' *

prename -v 's/_\(Hammer\)//ig' *

prename -v 's/_\(Hardware-Hybrid\)//g' *

prename -v 's/_\(digital\)//ig' *

prename -v 's/_\(Resolution-SD\)//ig' *

This is what i have tried so far, a for loop to iterate over the names I want to exclude and but that has not worked.

exclude=('(Summer-HD)' '(Hammer)' '(digital)' '(Resolution-SD)' '(Vacation)' '(Hammer-Hybrid)')

for x in "${exclude[@]}";
    do prename -v 's/$x/_/g' * {} \;
done

This for loop does not work at all and just leaves me with a blinking cursor. I'm not sure if I can pass a variable to prename. I modified the for loop a bit on some advise about wrapping things in double quotes.

for x in "${exclude[@]}";
    do prename -v 's/$x/_/g' *"$x"* {} \;
done

This also does not work, and now I have no idea what all is going on here. I still want to have the array for the names since I currently have more than 200 that i would like to remove. As for prename, I'm not married to the idea, I have heard sed could help or awk. Neither I am comfortable with to do this in. Thanks for any ideas or help provided.

Answer 1

You can define the array (or a scalar variable containing a regex made up from a list) inside the prename script - remember that you can use any valid perl code inside a prename script (because a prename script is a specialised perl script). e.g.

$ touch foo_\(Summer-HD\)_\(digital\).mkv
$ prename -n 'BEGIN {
                our $exclude=join("|", qw(Summer-HD Hammer digital Resolution-SD Vacation Hammer-Hybrid));
              };

              our $exclude;
              s/_\((?:$exclude)\)//ig;' *
rename(foo_(Summer-HD)_(digital).mkv, foo.mkv)

There's a few things worth noting here:

1. Variable scope is very important in a rename script, and the use strict pragma is in effect. See perldoc strict (there's a lot more to it but, tl;dr: with strict you can't use variables you haven't previously declared in the current scope).
2. The $exclude variable is defined in a BEGIN {} block so that it is only executed ONCE when the script is executed, not once for every filename. It contains the array joined by | characters - i.e. regex alternations.
3. It's defined as an our variable so that is shared outside of the BEGIN block, i.e. it's available within the entire scope of the File::Rename package. That's probably more than you care to know, so just think of it as a global variable for the rename script. The main code block also needs to declare it (with just our $exclude;). See perldoc -f our
4. qw() is one of perl's quoting operators, which turns a list of whitespace-separated bare words into an array. See perldoc -f qw. BTW, in perl, "array" and "list" are almost synonyms - see perldoc -q difference.*list.*array

Also worth noting is that instead of running rename multiple times, you should run it once with a longer script (or with multiple -e '...script...' options). e.g.

$ prename -n 'BEGIN {
                our $exclude=join("|", qw(Summer-HD Hammer digital Resolution-SD Vacation Hammer-Hybrid));
              };

              our $exclude;

              s/ /_/g;
              s/_-_/_/g;
              s/_\((?:$exclude)\)//ig;' *

Answer 2

It's easier with zsh:

exclude=(
  '(Summer-HD)'
  '(Hammer)'
  '(digital)'
  '(Resolution-SD)'
  '(Vacation)'
  '(Hammer-Hybrid)'
)

pattern="_(${(j[|])${(b@)exclude}})"

autoload -Uz zmv
zmv '*' '${f//$~pattern}'

Where ${(b)exclude} escapes the glob operators in the elements of $exclude, ${(j[|])...} joins the result with |, so we end up with $pattern being _(exclude1|exclude2...) (specifically: _(\(Summer-HD\)|\(Hammer\)|\(digital\)|\(Resolution-SD\)|\(Vacation\)|\(Hammer-Hybrid\))), and matches of that are replaced with nothing using the ${f//pattern[/replacement]} operator from ksh93 inside the zmv batch renamer.