Batch music directory rename script/command for Linux (bash)

Question

I have a lot of directories which have as name: (YYYY) Artist - Album

Some examples:

(2009) Vengaboys - Greatest Hits!
(2010) AC_DC - Iron Man 2
(2014) Simon & Garfunkel - The Complete Albums Collection
(2014) Various Artists - 100 Hits Acoustic
(2015) Various Artists - Graspop Metal Meeting 1996-2015

How can I best batch rename those directories to following template Artist - Album (YYYY)?

Thus above output should become:

Vengaboys - Greatest Hits! (2009)
AC_DC - Iron Man 2 (2010)
Simon & Garfunkel - The Complete Albums Collection (2014)
Various Artists - 100 Hits Acoustic (2014)
Various Artists - Graspop Metal Meeting 1996-2015 (2015)

Directories not having a (YYYY) prefix should not be modified.

Could someone help me with a linux bash script or sed command to make this happen?

@Jens is right. Please post what you have done so far to solve this. If you want us to help, you should try to help yourself first. — Mukesh Adhvaryu, Jun 05 '16 at 12:04

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 05 '16 at 11:21

Dealing with spaces and parentheses can be rather tricky with bash. I would use perl for this:

rename.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

opendir my $dh, "./" or die "Unable to opendir : $!";
for my $dir ( readdir($dh) ) {
    # Skip anything that is not a directory matching '(YYYY) Name' 
    next unless -d "./$dir" and $dir =~ m|^(\(\d{4}\))\s(.*)$|;
    my $new_name = "$2 $1";
    print "'$dir' -> '$new_name'\n";
    rename $dir, $new_name
    or die "Unable to rename '$dir' to '$new_name' : $!";
}

Generally, life is made easier by sticking to file/directory names without spaces or special characters. Here is how to use it:

$ ls
(2009) Vengaboys - Greatest Hits!
(2010) AC_DC - Iron Man 2
(2014) Simon & Garfunkel - The Complete Albums Collection
(2014) Various Artists - 100 Hits Acoustic
(2015) Various Artists - Graspop Metal Meeting 1996-2015
rename.pl

$ perl rename.pl
'(2009) Vengaboys - Greatest Hits!' -> 'Vengaboys - Greatest Hits! (2009)'
'(2010) AC_DC - Iron Man 2' -> 'AC_DC - Iron Man 2 (2010)'
'(2014) Simon & Garfunkel - The Complete Albums Collection' -> 'Simon & Garfunkel - The Complete Albums Collection (2014)'
'(2014) Various Artists - 100 Hits Acoustic' -> 'Various Artists - 100 Hits Acoustic (2014)'
'(2015) Various Artists - Graspop Metal Meeting 1996-2015' -> 'Various Artists - Graspop Metal Meeting 1996-2015 (2015)'

$ ls
AC_DC - Iron Man 2 (2010)
Simon & Garfunkel - The Complete Albums Collection (2014)
Various Artists - 100 Hits Acoustic (2014)
Various Artists - Graspop Metal Meeting 1996-2015 (2015)
Vengaboys - Greatest Hits! (2009)
rename.pl

Batch music directory rename script/command for Linux (bash)

1 Answers1