Rename files in shell script

Just use a for loop with shell expansion. This is preferred way. Postman almost has it. For rename. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Shell script to rename files Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 4 months ago. One is written in Perl, the other is distributed with util-linux, so I distinguish them as "perl rename" and "util rename" below.

How can you tell which rename you have? Try running rename -V ; if your version is util rename it will print the version number and if it is perl rename it will harmlessly report and unknown option and show usage. If you don't have either rename or mmv and don't want to or can't install them you can still accomplish this with plain old shell code:. I was able to achieve replace filenames within directories by combining dtrckd and Sorpigal answers. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Rename multiple files in shell [duplicate] Ask Question. I have never attempted this specific task, but by using Get-Command and Get-Help , we were able to find exactly how to do this in a couple of minutes.

Sit back and let Windows PowerShell do all of the work for you. Anyone who has access to modify the files and is running Windows 7 can follow these steps. No special tools or elevated rights are required.

Instructs Get-ChildItem to search recursively through all subfolders under the start point the current directory where the command is run from. For an added bonus, I also recommended that Cristofer use the — WhatIf parameter with this command on his first run to get an output that shows what the command will do before he actually pulls the trigger. It will not actually rename anything—it will simply show what files were found that match the filter criteria and what each new name would be.

Here is the command with the -WhatIf parameter added. If you need a log file that shows the results of using -WhatIf , you can follow these steps:. Note that the "mv" command is commented-out by default.

You'll have to manually remove that comment to get the actual move command to work, and I suggest only doing that after you run this script at least once with just the "echo" output. I've added more warnings to the documentation of this script, because any time you perform a "move" or "copy" operation you have a chance of losing data. As mentioned in those warnings, the "mv" command in this script is now commented-out by default; you must remove the comment character before the mv command for the move to work; and you should only do that after running the script once and verifying the "echo" output is what you expect.

A Unix shell script to rename many files at one time. By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: November 27,