Mass Renaming Files

Introduction

Mass renaming of files can vary depending on what platform and system you're on. If you're on Unix, and more specifically Unix, the following techniques should be available to you.

If you're using RedBrick then both mmv and rename are available to you.

In this scenario, we are going to try and rename all .php files in the current directory so they have a .gif extension

WARNING: always backup your files

Using mmv

mmv '*.php' '#1.gif'

Using rename

rename 's/\.php$/.gif/' *.php

In the Bash shell

for file in *.php; do mv "$file" "${file%.php}.gif"; done

Slightly more complex shell version

This has the benefit of using a full regular expression in the sed part so you can do much more complex renames, it is also generally more widely available as rename is not available in as many places as ls, awk, sed and sh.

ls *.php | awk '{print("mv "$1" "$1)}' | sed 's/php/gif/2' | /bin/sh