One liner to rename bunch of files

Question

I was looking for a linux command line one-liner to rename a bunch of files in one shot.

pattern1.a  pattern1.b pattern1.c ...

Once the command is executed I should get

pattern2.a  pattern2.b pattern2.c ...

Answer 1

If you happen to be using Linux, you may also have a perl script at /usr/bin/rename which cane rename files based on more complex patterns than shell globbing permits.

The /usr/bin/rename on one of my systems is documented here. It could be used like this:

rename "s/pattern1/pattern2/" pattern1.*

A number of other Linux environments seem to have a different rename that might be used like this:

rename pattern1 pattern2 pattern1.*

Check man rename on your system for details.

Answer 2

for i in pattern1.*; do mv -- "$i" "${i/pattern1/pattern2}"; done

Before you run it, stick an echo in front of the mv to see what it would do.

Answer 3

Plenty of ways to skin this cat. If you'd prefer your pattern to be a regex rather than a fileglob, and you'd like to do the change recursively you could use something like this:

find . -print | sed -ne '/^\.\/pattern1\(\..*\)/s//mv "&" "pattern2\1"/p'

As Kerrek suggested with his answer, this one first shows you what it would do. Pipe the output through a shell (i.e. add | sh to the end) once you're comfortable with the commands.

This works for me:

[ghoti@pc ~]$ ls -l foo.*
-rw-r--r--  1 ghoti  wheel  0 Mar 26 13:59 foo.php
-rw-r--r--  1 ghoti  wheel  0 Mar 26 13:59 foo.txt
[ghoti@pc ~]$ find . -print | sed -ne '/^\.\/foo\(\..*\)/s//mv "&" "bar\1"/p'
mv "./foo.txt" "bar.txt"
mv "./foo.php" "bar.php"
[ghoti@pc ~]$ find . -print | sed -ne '/^\.\/foo\(\..*\)/s//mv "&" "bar\1"/p' | sh
[ghoti@pc ~]$ ls -l foo.* bar.*
ls: foo.*: No such file or directory
-rw-r--r--  1 ghoti  wheel  0 Mar 26 13:59 bar.php
-rw-r--r--  1 ghoti  wheel  0 Mar 26 13:59 bar.txt
[ghoti@pc ~]$