command line - How to specify a space as part of a wildcard string for bulk renaming of files

I have approximately 1200 songs in a folder whose filenames are structured as follows:

artist_name - song_name.mp3

For example:

Billy Joel - Piano Man.mp3
The Beatles - Nowhere Man.mp3

I'd like to use DOS commands in Windows PowerShell to do a bulk rename of these files to remove the space on either side of the hyphen. I don't want to remove all spaces, however. The basic problem is to be able to include spaces in the filename specs in order to change " - " to "-" in all files in a directory. Here are some examples of what I'd like to change:

Existing filenames

Billy Joel - Piano Man.mp3
The Beatles - Nowhere Man.mp3

Desired filenames

Billy Joel-Piano Man.mp3

The Beatles-Nowhere Man.mp3

Can someone think of a DOS command that could be executed at the command prompt to make such a change on all files in the directory?

I've found that to list all such files with a DIR command, I can use:

DIR asterisk+doublequote+space+hyphen+space+doublequote+asterisk+dot+asterisk

I had to write it out that way because the actual syntax appears to be treated as formatting instructions here in this forum.

This lists all files which have the 3-character string of space-hyphen-space.

Surely, there must be a way.

Answer

You can run this command:

ls | %{ ren $_ ($_.name -replace ' - ','-') }

using Powershell. This replaces {space}-{space} with -.