Renaming using capture groups in Bash

bash, regex

Solution

You can use:

for i in *.a; do
   mv "$i" "${i%%-*}.a"
done

`%%` will remove a matching suffix pattern; in this case, it removes `-*`, or everything starting with the first `-`.

Problem

I would like to rename several files of the format ``` libabc-x86_64-gnu-linux.a libasdfgh-x86-gnu-linux.a ``` all to the format ``` libabc.a libasdfgh.a ``` using Bash. I have written the regex `(libpj[^-]*).*`, which should leave the interesting part in capture group 1. So I tried to use parameter substitution with Bash: ``` for i in `ls *.a`; do mv "$i" "${i/(lib[^-]*).*/\1}"; done ``` But Bash gives many errors of the form ``` mv: 'libabc-x86_64-gnu-linux.a' and 'libabc-x86_64-gnu-linux.a' are the same file ``` implying that the regex is somehow not matching, even though I have confirmed that it does with several utilities, especially the very excellent RegExr. What am I doing wrong? Does Bash have trouble with capture groups?

Original source