[SOLVED] A sequence of Bash commands that work in the terminal but not in a script

Issue

I want to remove all special characters with a space except the dot before the extension. Let's take this file as an example, since I have tons of them.

FRD - 2023.04.12 - (mj)_Text and other chars[ ].txt

Desired output:

FRD 2023 04 12 mj Text and other chars.txt

I've written a series of commands that allow me to do just that:

1. Remove all dots except the extension one:

   rename -v 's/\.(?!(avi|mkv|mp4|mov|wmv|jpg|jpeg|png|txt))/ /g' *
   

   Result: FRD - 2023 04 12 - (mj)_Text and other chars[ ].txt

2. Remove all other characters except the extension dot:

   rename -v 's/(([^a-zA-Z\d\s])|(-)|(:))(?!(avi|mkv|mp4|mov|wmv|iso|jpg|jpeg|png|txt))/ /gi' *
   

   Result: FRD 2023 04 12 mj Text and other chars .txt

3. Reduce multiple spaces to a single one:

   rename -v 's/\s{1,10}/ /g' *
   

   Result: FRD 2023 04 12 mj Text and other chars .txt

4. And because there were characters just before the extension, remove this space:

   rename -v 's/(\s+)(?=(\.))//g' *
   

   Result: FRD 2023 04 12 mj Text and other chars.txt

Now I put all these commands in a script with a for loop. Here is the script:

#!/bin/bash

for f in ./*; do
    
    rename -v 's/\.(?!(avi|mkv|mp4|mov|wmv|mpg|iso|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|txt))/ /gi' *
    rename -v 's/(([^a-zA-Z\d\s])|(:))(?!(avi|mkv|mp4|mov|wmv|mpg|iso|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|txt))/ /gi' *
    rename -v 's/\s{1,10}/ /g' *
    rename -v 's/(\s+)(?=(\.))//g' *
    
done

Here's how it looks using the script:

FRD 2023 04 12 Mj Text and Other Chars Txt

Why, if all these commands work one after the other, do they not give the same result in a script? What is the problem is?

Solution

When you run the commands individually, you pass * to each command, which expands to the current file list. In the script you have a for loop, which executes the commands on all files, and repeats for the amount of files. This means that if you have 17 files in the directory, each command will run 17 times on all files, which is not what you want.

Simply remove the for loop, and keep the commands as they are;

#!/bin/bash
rename -v '...x...' *
rename -v '...y...' *
# and so on..

(of course, replace '...x...'/'...y...' with the actual patterns)

Answered By - micromoses

Answer Checked By - Gilberto Lyons (WPSolving Admin)