Rename multiple files

November 5th, 2006 toydi Posted in Common, Regular Expression, for, mv | Hits: 100922 |

Often over time, we will want to reorganize a group of files by renaming them.

To rename *.txt to *.bak
(e.g. to rename ham.txt to ham.bak)

for f in *.txt; do mv "$f" "${f%.txt}.bak"; done

To remove ‘new-’ from new-*
(e.g. to rename new-ham.txt to ham.txt)

for f in new-*; do mv "$f" "${f#new-}"; done

${variable%pattern} vs ${variable#pattern}

The funny-looking symbol, ${f%.txt} is a useful match-and-remove string operator:

If the pattern ‘.txt’ matches the end of variable $f, it will remove the matching part (that’s ‘.txt‘) and return the rest. Try this:

f=new-ham.txt      # define $f as 'new-ham.txt'
echo ${f%.txt}     # display 'new-ham'

What about ${f#new-}? It’s almost the same, but it matches the pattern at the beginning of the variable.

echo ${f#new-}     # display 'ham.txt'

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mysurface Says:
November 6th, 2006 at 12:02 am

Great tips, this is an example related to regular expression, why don’t add in to RE category?

toydi Says:
November 6th, 2006 at 12:07 am

As you wish. ;-)

wolfette Says:
July 11th, 2007 at 12:46 pm

This is the 2-cent tip that worths $1,000,00 dollars. Thank you very much. It’s what I was looking for days ago.

allain Says:
July 27th, 2007 at 1:03 am

rename ’s/\.txt/.bak/’ *.txt

mysurface Says:
July 27th, 2007 at 1:36 am

Cool, that is convenient. I have trace it . It is a perl script ‘prename’ in my box.

Dave Says:
July 30th, 2007 at 3:24 am

Hi
You can accomplish the same trick and much more using Vladimir Lanin’s mmv utility. It is available for most distros.

Doddo Says:
July 30th, 2007 at 4:13 am

At first I was like “NO WAY” that can be done, “it looks exactly like bash/sh syntx” but then I realized that it was on linux.

MS DOS have some syntax in common with UNIX shell syntaxes, but not that much.

BTW I saw that you could use a hosts.deny in MS Windows (just put it in C:\hosts.deny apparently). I dont think it has anything to do with the linux/BSD tcp wrappers though ;D

StumbleUpon Exchange Says:
August 9th, 2007 at 1:13 pm

great tip! i can now speed up my `split`s w00t

Ralf Tenbrink Says:
October 21st, 2007 at 9:04 am

I tried rename â€™s/\.txt/.bak/â€™ *.txt but it does nothing what so ever on my system (Suse 10.2). Looks simple enough but nothing ever is with Linux, lol

allain Says:
October 21st, 2007 at 10:26 pm

Ubuntu 7.04 works

sso Says:
November 7th, 2007 at 10:20 am

thanks for the tip

phord Says:
November 9th, 2007 at 11:25 pm

/usr/bin/rename appears to come-with Perl (v5.8.8 on my system). It’s a Perl script.

krishna Says:
April 15th, 2008 at 6:48 pm

this is very useful. first time i thik it can’t be possible. but the question was logical.so i tryed to find it.

The Dapper Wrapper. | 7Wins.eu Says:
June 6th, 2008 at 2:40 pm

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zonkie Says:
February 3rd, 2010 at 10:39 am

should you need to rename or change the filename on multiple files where the char or chars that needs to be replaced is in the middle e.g. file-is-this.txt say you want to replace “is” with “or” you can do this:

for i in *.txt ; do mv “${i}” “${i/is/or}” ;done;

i hope that helps someone

Scott O Says:
February 19th, 2010 at 6:25 am

Thanks this helped allot. I have to rename all the chapters in the bible now it is not a problem. Thanks again