Rename multiple files, but only rename part of the filename in Bash

bash file-rename
user3115029 picture user3115029 · Dec 18, 2013 · Viewed 76.5k times · Source

I know how I can rename files and such, but I'm having trouble with this.

I only need to rename test-this in a for loop.

test-this.ext
test-this.volume001+02.ext
test-this.volume002+04.ext 
test-this.volume003+08.ext 
test-this.volume004+16.ext 
test-this.volume005+32.ext 
test-this.volume006+64.ext 
test-this.volume007+78.ext

Answer

Tim Zimmermann picture Tim Zimmermann · Dec 18, 2013

If you have all of these files in one folder and you're on Linux you can use:

rename 's/test-this/REPLACESTRING/g' *

The result will be:

REPLACESTRING.ext
REPLACESTRING.volume001+02.ext
REPLACESTRING.volume002+04.ext
...

rename can take a command as the first argument. The command here consists of four parts:

  1. s: flag to substitute a string with another string,
  2. test-this: the string you want to replace,
  3. REPLACESTRING: the string you want to replace the search string with, and
  4. g: a flag indicating that all matches of the search string shall be replaced, i.e. if the filename is test-this-abc-test-this.ext the result will be REPLACESTRING-abc-REPLACESTRING.ext.

Refer to man sed for a detailed description of the flags.

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