Rename Files Downloaded Using youtube-dl
June 10, 2023 —
Gregg Szumowski
If you have used youtube-dl to download content from
YouTube then you know that the file names can get to be rather long. In
addition to the video’s title there is a dash followed by what appears
to be a random sequence of characters just before the file extension. If
you find this to be annoying then here is a code snippet that you can
use to remove it.
This will remove the last field separated by a ‘-’ and replace it with the file extension of your choice, .mp4 is used in this example:
#!/bin/bash
for i in *.mp4
do
# Remove everything from the last hyphen to the end
file="${i%-*}"
# Rename the file and remove the space between 'file'
# and the file extension on the fly
mv "${i}" "${file%%*( )}.mp4"
done