BASH script to remove numeric prefix from files downloaded from scribd

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Scribd is a great service, offering PDF downloads of a variety of content.  Unfortunately there is an ugly 8 digit (random?) number prefixed on each file downloaded.

47432750-Book-Name-Whatever.pdf
47501680-Another-Book-Name.pdf
47502885-Yet-Another-Book-Name.pdf

It’s not descriptive, and it makes alphabetic sorting of the files downloaded impossible.  Here’s a small BASH shell script that will remove the first 9 characters (8 digits and the – character) from all pdf files in a directory.

#!/bin/bash
for f in *.pdf; do
file=${f:9}
[ ! -f $file ] && mv "$f" $file
done

Create the above in a file, save it, and be sure to use chmod +x filename to make the shell script executable.

About the author

Tim

I'm an all around computer junkie, interested in many aspects of programming, operating systems, and enterprise IT technologies. I love Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows and more!