Rename multiple files based on pattern in Unix

Question

There are multiple files in a directory that begin with prefix fgh, for example:

fghfilea
fghfileb
fghfilec

I want to rename a

Answer 1

There are many ways to do it (not all of these will work on all unixy systems):

• ls | cut -c4- | xargs -I§ mv fgh§ jkl§

  The § may be replaced by anything you find convenient. You could do this with find -exec too but that behaves subtly different on many systems, so I usually avoid that

• for f in fgh*; do mv "$f" "${f/fgh/jkl}";done

  Crude but effective as they say

• rename 's/^fgh/jkl/' fgh*

  Real pretty, but rename is not present on BSD, which is the most common unix system afaik.

• rename fgh jkl fgh*

• ls | perl -ne 'chomp; next unless -e; $o = $_; s/fgh/jkl/; next if -e; rename $o, $_';

  If you insist on using Perl, but there is no rename on your system, you can use this monster.

Some of those are a bit convoluted and the list is far from complete, but you will find what you want here for pretty much all unix systems.

Answer 2

This is how sed and mv can be used together to do rename:

for f in fgh*; do mv "$f" $(echo "$f" | sed 's/^fgh/jkl/g'); done

As per comment below, if the file names have spaces in them, quotes may need to surround the sub-function that returns the name to move the files to:

for f in fgh*; do mv "$f" "$(echo $f | sed 's/^fgh/jkl/g')"; done

Answer 3

You can also use below script. it is very easy to run on terminal...

//Rename multiple files at a time

for file in  FILE_NAME*
do
    mv -i "${file}" "${file/FILE_NAME/RENAMED_FILE_NAME}"
done

Example:-

for file in  hello*
do
    mv -i "${file}" "${file/hello/JAISHREE}"
done

Answer 4

On Solaris you can try:

for file in `find ./ -name "*TextForRename*"`; do 
    mv -f "$file" "${file/TextForRename/NewText}"
done