combining sed with xargs to obtain a source and output file name
- by Lytithwyn
I have a situation where I have some input files like this:
M2U0001.MPG
M2U0180.MPG
And I want to run a command (in a bash shell) on each similarly named file in the directory. I'd like the current file name to be given to this command as an input and a modified version of the filename to be given as an output file. Here's an example:
ffmpeg -i M2U0001.MPG M2U0001_fixed.MPG
I had the idea of using xargs and sed, but this is as far as I got:
ls -1 *.MPG | xargs -I{} ffmpeg -i {} `echo {} | sed -r 's/[0-9]{2,}/&_fixed/'`
But this results in the original filename being output in both positions. Am I totally going about this the wrong way?
I found that if I echo the filename directly to the embedded chunk like this it works:
echo M2U0001.MPG | sed -r 's/[0-9]{2,}/&_fixed/'
