Noodlesoft Forums

Hi Community,

I have a bunch of files which I need to rename:

HDBB1A_ab.txt should become HDBB1_ab.txt

In other words, the 6th (sixth) character needs to be deleted. I've got two possible code lines:

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mv $1 $(echo $1 | sed 's/.//6')

and

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mv $1 $(echo $1 | sed 's6/.//')

But the one nor the other doesn't work. Any idea what I'm missing in the code?

How about using Hazel's pattern matching? Create a pattern with two custom attributes. One for the first 5 characters and one for the rest of the characters after the 6th. In the Rename pattern, you can then combine those.

This sounds great. As I saw, it’s a kind of “comfortable regex”. But I don’t get it to work.

I created a pattern with two attributes:

5 characters: “a a a a a1”
7+ characters: “_ab.txt”
Match the 1st occurrence from the beginning.

The syntax of the filenames is always the same:

4 letters
2 alphanumeric characters
the string “_ab.txt”

Your pattern seems off. It looks like there should be two "a1" instances. Also, not sure if it's in your actual pattern but it doesn't seem as if you want spaces in between each "a" token.

It looks like there should be two "a1" instances.

No, because the second "a1" instance is the 6th character which must be deleted.

Also, not sure if it's in your actual pattern but it doesn't seem as if you want spaces in between each "a" token.

The spaces are only in my forum response, not in the attribute:

The "a1" token only matches one character, either a letter or digit. If you have two characters in your example ("1A"), so you need two "a1" tokens.

I tried now (and even earlier today) to work with three match attributes:

whereas the second attribute looks like this:

Again, no effect.

Maybe this will help to understand it easier:
In InDesign GREP (or Regex) I would do the following:

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Find: (\w{5})\w(_ab\.txt)

In words: Find "attribute 1", "attribute 2", and "attribute 3"

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Replace: $1$2

in words: Replace with "attribute 1" and "attribute 3"

Finally, I succeeded!

Instead of "Name matches"
I now tried "Full Name matches"

and the pattern incl. rename works.