Skip navigation.
Home
mattfleming.com
Home

Rename files in *nix

Submitted by Matt Fleming on Tue, 2006-05-23 16:02.

In windows renaming a group of files is super easy.. in *nix os's it was less obvious. I finally figured out a decent one-liner.. 


ls tau/* | sed -e 's/\(.*\)abb\(.*\)/mv & \1aaa\2/' | sh

This will take all files in the tau subdirectory named *abb* and rename them *aaa*. The key is the pipe through sed.. which translated to english says: substitute the replacement string (mv & \1aaa\2) for the first occurrence of the pattern ((.*\)abb\(.*\)). It looks more complicated than it really is thanks to escaping.

ls tau/* | sed -e '(s)ubstitute/pattern/replacement/' | sh (to perform the command)

note: the ampersand symbol is being translated to & on the site.. so the command should use an ampersand wherever the & is currently seen.. I'll fix the drupal module some point. Eye-wink

»

go on then.

Submitted by ct (not verified) on Wed, 2006-05-24 18:01.

how do you do it in windows?

»
Matt Fleming's picture

point made

Submitted by Matt Fleming on Fri, 2006-05-26 16:05.

I should have said renaming file extensions in windows is ez.. 


rename *.aaa *.abb

The double wildcarding doesn't seem to work like I would want it to at all.. 


touch matt_aaa_matt
rename *aaa* *bbb*
dir matt*
05/26/2006  03:53p                   0 matt_aaa_mattbbb

Yuck..

»

RE:Rename

Submitted by Iouri Goussev (not verified) on Thu, 2006-05-25 00:57.

On Linux you can use "rename aab aaa *aab*" from util-linux. I don't know about other platforms, but you can simply recompile it. It works fine on my Solaris 9.

»
Matt Fleming's picture

I looked up the rename

Submitted by Matt Fleming on Fri, 2006-05-26 16:17.

I looked up the rename command on my linux box (Debian 3.1) and got the man page for a perl library.. 


RENAME(1)              Perl Programmers Reference Guide
NAME
       rename - renames multiple files
SYNOPSIS
       rename [ -v ] [ -n ] [ -f ] perlexpr [ files ]

I was able to achieve what I wanted using 


touch matt_aaa_matt
rename 's/aaa/bbb/' *aaa*
ls matt*
matt_bbb_matt

My one-liner should work on a variety of unixes without porting a rename command, but as always there are many ways to get stuff done in *nix like OSs. Smiling

»

There is one more way to do this

Submitted by Victor (not verified) on Thu, 2006-05-25 02:07.

You could use a more algorithmic approach as well: 


for i in *abb*; do
  # execute 'mv' with substituted target file name
  mv $i `echo $i | sed -e s/abb/aaa/`;
done
»