I'm trying to get a regex to work with rename; I've tried the approach of similar answered questions here but couldn't get the results I wanted.

The files are named as such:

    SR1_S90_L001_R1_001.fastq.gz 
    SR1_S90_L001_R2_001.fastq.gz
    Rinc_S96_L001_R1_001.fastq.gz 
    Rinc_S96_L001_R2_001.fastq.gz

And I would like to retain only the information prior to the first underscore and the _R1_ or _R2_ tags, like this:

    SR1_R1_.fastq.gz
    SR1_R2_.fastq.gz
    Rinc_R1_.fastq.gz 
    Rinc_R2_.fastq.gz

Thanks in advance!
 `rename -n 's/(\w_).*_(R[0-9])_.*(.fastq.gz)/$1$2$3/' *.fastq.gz` or `rename -n 's/(\w+_)\w+_\w+_(\w._)\w+(.\w+)/$1$2$3/' *.fastq.gz`

-n runs the command in dummy mode and it is distro specific. Check the available for options for rename on your distro. -n option is available on ubuntu 18.04  and remove -n for final conversion. 