Hi, I am trying to rename a complete directory of files to remove the first three characters. All the filenames have spaces throughout them and the first several characters look like this: "01 Filename hour 1.mp3" "02 Filename hour 2.mp3" "03 Filename hour 3.mp3" I want to remove the initial numbers (ex: "01 ") This is the code I have so far: @echo off setlocal cd "c:\iTunes\Podcasts\R24\" for %%a in (*.mp3) do call :process "%%a" goto :eof :process set fileName=%1 ren "%fileName%" "%fileName:~4%" It works great with one exception: the first file processed is not renamed correctly. Here is what was echoed to the command prompt when the first file was processed: ren "01 Fri, August 21st, 2009 Hour 1.mp3" "Fri, August 21st, 2009 Hour 1.mp3" The actual name the file ended up with was: ", August 21st, 2009 Hour 1.mp3" I tried to remove the weekday, comma, and space to give all files names like "August 21st, 2009 Hour 1.mp3" instead (changed the 4 to a 9 in the batch script). In that case the first file processed ended up with the following name: "1st, 2009 Hour 1.mp3" I also tried to remove the August 21st Hour 1 file to see if that particular file was the problem. The first file continued to be the only one named incorrectly. If anyone can help I'd appreciate it. I'm also curious why using a 1 instead of a 4 in the rename command (such as %fileName:~1%) does not remove a single character from any filename. Thanks.

There seems to be some sort of race condition when using the standard version of FOR. The work around is to use its text parsing feature and DIR. for /f "delims=" %%a in ('dir /b *.mp3') do call :process "%%a"

Thanks Razor. "delims=" ... does that effectively turn parsing off by setting the delimiter to nothing? I've seen that syntax a few times now but I'm not clear on what it's doing. Regards, techphets

does that effectively turn parsing off by setting the delimiter to nothing? Pretty much, yeah.

Excellent. Works perfectly. Thanks much!