Remove last seven characters from multiple filenames?

Hello.

I have a bunch of documents in a data base, all associated with TIFF images, and all having unique DOCIDs. When I batch-print several of the TIFFs to PDFs, the stupid program, instead of just naming them by their DOCIDs, appends a seven-digit serial number to the DOCID, thus:

ABCD0000789 --> ABCD00007891234567.PDF

I want to delete those last seven digits before the dot.

I know there are free utilities that make this stuff easy, but I'm at work, where I'm not allowed to install programs; so I have to use native DOS or Windows 7 functions. I'm sure it can be done quickly and easily with the REN command in a DOS window, but I don't know how to identify the last seven digits for REN and tell it to delete them.

Unfortunately, what comes before the last seven digits is variable--it's always some letters followed by some numerals, but the number of each can vary, there might be a hyphen or a space among the letters, and there might be a space between the letters and the numerals; so I can't just tell DOS to delete everything after the first n digits, which I gather would be easier. (I've found several examples of scripts for removing the first so-many digits, but I can't figure out how to adapt those to solve my problem.)


Thanks for any help.

Regards,

Jim Crutchfield
Long Island City, NY

Thanks for the help!

I'm working with only one file at the moment, and I copied JDobbsy's code exactly, except that I put in ".pdf" for ".txt":

Code:

for %%i in (*.pdf) do (set fName=%i)
ren %fName% %fName:~0,-11%.pdf

Unfortunately, when I try that, I get,

C:\Temp\test>i) was unexpected at this time.
C:\Temp\test>for i)

The help file for "FOR" says,

To use the FOR command in a batch program, specify %%variable instead of %variable.

so I tried

Code:

for %%i in (*.pdf) do (set fName=%i)
ren %fName% %fName:~0,-11%.pdf

which results in

C:\Temp\test>for %i in (*.pdf) do (set fName=i )
C:\Temp\test>(set fName=i )
C:\Temp\test>ren i .pdf
The system cannot find the file specified.

I'm probably just showing my ignorance here--or maybe my senility: it's been twenty years since I tried to write a DOS batch file, and I've completely forgotten the language. I'm probably leaving out standard code that you guys take for granted.

Meanwhile, I've found the following on DOStips.com, which looks like it might be something in the right direction:

Code:

:rTrim string char max -- strips white spaces (or other characters) from the end of a string
::                     -- string [in,out] - string variable to be trimmed
::                     -- char   [in,opt] - character to be trimmed, default is space
::                     -- max    [in,opt] - maximum number of characters to be trimmed from the end, default is 32
:$created 20060101 :$changed 20080219 :$categories StringManipulation
:$source http://www.dostips.com
SETLOCAL ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION
call set string=%%%~1%%
set char=%~2
set max=%~3
if "%char%"=="" set char= &rem one space
if "%max%"=="" set max=32
for /l %%a in (1,1,%max%) do if "!string:~-1!"=="%char%" set string=!string:~0,-1!
( ENDLOCAL & REM RETURN VALUES
    IF "%~1" NEQ "" SET %~1=%string%
)
EXIT /b

But I can't really read it well enough to know. I don't think it requires the string to have any particular number of characters before the ones we want to trim.

I suspect that if we set "%char%" to * (i.e., any character) and set "%max%" to equal seven (or 11 if we can't define the file suffix out of our string), it might work; but we'd need to preserve (or restore) the file suffix.

I also don't see how the string is defined in the first place (maybe that "call" function at the beginning?); and I'm not sure how to make a loop in a DOS batch file, though that shouldn't be hard to find out.

I'll give it a try, but I'll have to rely on you guys to make it work. ;0)

Thanks again!

Regards,

Jim Crutchfield

Aha! Thanks, JDobbsy! Adding another % let the command run, but I hove up against another problem: many of my filenames have spaces in them, which make REN return a syntax error. By trial and error, I figured out how to put the fName variable in quotation marks:

Code:

for %%i in (*.pdf) do (set fName="%%i")

and that worked like a charm, except that

Code:

ren %fName% %fName:~0,-11%.pdf

was only lopping off the last six digits. I don't know what the ~0,-11 arguments mean (assuming they're arguments), but I took a wild stab and changed -11 to -12. Now here's what I get:

C:\Temp\test>renpdf.bat
C:\Temp\test>for %i in (*.pdf) do (set fName="%i")
C:\Temp\test>(set fName="EY 000000302768049.pdf")
C:\Temp\test>ren "EY 000000302768049.pdf" "EY 00000030.pdf"

which is exactly what I want. I don't know how it works, but it works. Thanks again, JDobbsy1987! Now for the loop!

Edit: a little research tells me that the ~0,-12 bit is a modifier that strips the last n characters (in this case, n=12) from a string. I guess I had to add a character to JDobbsy1987's -11 in order to account for the quotation mark I'd added, though I'm not sure why that doesn't let the space cause problems again. At any rate, it seems to work.