powershellfilefile-renameexact-match

Replace exact part of file name with Powershell

I tried the code found here without success.

What I need is to replace an exact text with another, but this code doesn't seem to deal with exact text.

This is the code I used, and what I need is, for example, for a file name that ends with ".L.wav" to be replaced with "_L.wav", but what happens is that powershell tries to rename even the file that ends with ".BL.wav" into "_L.wav".

Thank you.

ls *.* | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace ".L.wav","_L.wav"}
ls *.* | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace ".LFE.wav","_LFE.wav"}
ls *.* | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace ".R.wav","_R.wav"}
ls *.* | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace ".BL.wav","_LSR.wav"}
ls *.* | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace ".BR.wav","_RSR.wav"}
ls *.* | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace ".SL.wav","_LSS.wav"}
ls *.* | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace ".SR.wav","_RSS.wav"}
Read-Host -Prompt "Press Enter to exit" ```
Solution

  • The dot in regex means Any Character. Without escaping that, things go wrong.

    Try

    Rename-Item -NewName {$_.Name -replace ('{0}$' -f [regex]::Escape('.L.wav')),'_L.wav'}

    or manually escape the regex metacharacters:

    Rename-Item -NewName {$_.Name -replace '\.L\.wav$','_L.wav'}

    The $ at the end anchors the text to match at the end on the string

    Also, instead of doing ls *.* | Rename-Item {...}, better use

    (Get-ChildItem -Filter '*.L.wav' -File) | Rename-Item {...}

    (ls is alias to Get-ChildItem )