Best way to Delete characters from Filename after a specific string of characters in Windows

Question

I was wondering if there's a quick an easy way to search for filenames with several characters and delete all the characters after those.

For example if I have a file called:

Great Movie Title 2021 1080p asldkfjalfj.mkv
Another Great Movie 1997 480p aldfasdfa.avi
Boring movie but its ok 2015 720p asadfqwr.mp4

I want to find 1080p, 720p, 480p in the file name and then delete everything after it.

I know you can use Windows Batch For loop but you can only use a single character to find it. Even if it's a third party app that can do this, but I can't seem to find it.

Answer 1

Are you searching the whole drive, or just a single directory?

Either way, PowerShell can handle this.

This will do the whole C drive, renaming anything with 1080p in the filename:

cd c:\
Get-ChildItem -recurse -include *1080p* | foreach-object { $name = $_.fullname; $newname = $name -replace '1080p.*\.','1080p.'; rename-item $name $newname } 

You could then repeat it for 480p and 720p.

Answer 2

PowerShell is the way to go.

Here's another approach that could get them all in one pass and easily modified.

This would be run from the top-level folder. Doing so frees up the -Path (positional here) paremeter to filter by multiple filetypes, because -Path, unlike -Filter, can take an array of values.

Get-ChildItem *.mkv, *.avi, *.mp4 -Recurse | ForEach {
    If ( $_.BaseName -match '^.+(1080p|720p|480p)' ) {
        Rename-Item -LiteralPath $_.FullName -NewName ( $matches[0] + $_.Extension )
    }
}

The regular expression '^.+(1080p|720p|480p)' matches all characters from rthe beginning of the filename up to and including any one of the "or'd" (|) resolution strings. That text is stored in the $matches automatic vafiable, and used to construct the new name.