How do I extract a file name into 2 parts, making one into directory and the other one inside of it?

Question

I\'m trying to sort all mp3 files by artist and name. At the moment, they\'re in 1 giant file name. E.g Artist - Song name.mp3 I want to convert this to Artist/Song name.mp

Answer 1

By far the simplest way of doing this is to use rename a.k.a. Perl rename.

Basically, you want to replace the sequence SPACE-DASH-SPACE with a forward slash directory separator, so the command is:

rename --dry-run -p 's| - |/|' *mp3

Sample Output

'Artist - Song name.mp3' would be renamed to 'Artist/Song name.mp3'
'Artist B - Song name 2.mp3' would be renamed to 'Artist B/Song name 2.mp3'

If that looks correct, just remove --dry-run and run it again for real. The benefits of using rename are:

• it can do a dry-run to test before you run for real
• it will create all necessary directories with the -p option
• it will not clobber (overwrite) files without warning
• you have the full power of Perl available to you and can make your renaming as sophisticated as you wish.

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Note that you can install on macOS with homebrew:

brew install rename