Bulk renaming files with bash and Perl based on file name

Question

I'm looking to bulk rename files in the current directory only and remove certain strings from the end of file names.

Sample:

foo-bar-(ab-4529111094).txt
foo-bar-foo-bar-(ab-189534).txt
foo-bar-foo-bar-bar-(ab-24937932201).txt

the output should look like this:

foo-bar.txt
foo-bar-foo-bar.txt
foo-bar-foo-bar-bar.txt

I want to remove the string -(ab-2492201) at the end of each file name knowing that the digits can vary in length.

A Perl regex is preferred over modules and without using any utilities and for bash oneliner command is highly preferred.

How to accomplish that in both Perl and Bash Shell on Linux? interested to know both solutions.

Answer 1

Try:

$ rename 's/-\(ab-\d+\)(?=\.txt$)//' *.txt

There's a rename command written in Perl. Its first argument is Perl code describing how to transform a filename. You could use the same s/// command in your own Perl program or one-liner.

If that doesn't work, try prename instead of rename; there's a different, non-Perl-based, rename command installed on some systems, in which case the Perl one may be called prename.