Remove all characters after file extension

Question

I've got dozens of files such as:

title.mkv]-[72+167] - "" yEnc  637005001 (1+889)

I'd like to remove everything after ".mkv"

I tried looking up some regex that would help me, but I don't understand how to use them.

Could somebody help me?

Answer 1

Note on rename, prename etc. see:

• Why is the rename utility on Debian/Ubuntu different than the one on other distributions, like CentOS?
• What's with all the renames: prename, rename, file-rename?

In this answer the Perl variant is used, not the one form util-linux. As in not:

$ rename --version
rename from util-linux 2.31.1

but:

$ rename --version
/usr/bin/rename using File::Rename version 0.20

or similar.

---

With Perl rename:

rename 's/\.mkv.*/.mkv/s' ./*.mkv*

Use the -n option first to make sure it does what you want.

rename -n 's/\.mkv.*/.mkv/s' ./*.mkv*

In short:

s/\.mkv.*/.mkv/s

is:

substitute/<THIS>/<WITH THIS>/s

\.mkv.* matches a literal dot \. then the string mkv and finally any character (including \n for which you need the s flag) zero or more times .*.

Result is replace .mkv<anything> with .mkv.

---

There is tools to help with reading and building expressions, like https://regex101.com/

Answer 2

With zsh's zmv:

autoload zmv
zmv -v '(*.mkv)*' '$1'

Removes the part after the rightmost occurrence of .mkv in the filename (renames foo.mkv-bar.mkv-whatever to foo.mkv-bar.mkv).

For the leftmost occurrence (to rename that file to foo.mkv instead), you could replace *.mkv with *.mkv~*.mkv?* which matches a string ending in .mkv but which also otherwise does not contain .mkv followed by at least one character using the ~ "except" glob operator.

Answer 3

in bash:

for f in *; do [[ "$f" =~ ^.+\.mkv ]] && mv "$f" "${BASH_REMATCH[0]}"; done

Answer 4

In a script bash

#!/bin/bash
for i in *.mkv*
do
  j=$(echo "$i" | sed -e 's/\.mkv.*$/.mkv/')
  mv -- "$i" "$j"
done