How to rename with prefix/suffix?

bash rename filenames prefix mv
Peter Boughton picture Peter Boughton · Oct 16, 2008 · Viewed 132.5k times · Source

How do I do mv original.filename new.original.filename without retyping the original filename?

I would imagine being able to do something like mv -p=new. original.filename or perhaps mv original.filename new.~ or whatever - but I can't see anything like this after looking at man mv / info mv pages.

Of course, I could write a shell script to do this, but isn't there an existing command/flag for it?

Answer

Simon Lehmann picture Simon Lehmann · Oct 16, 2008

You could use the rename(1) command:

rename 's/(.*)$/new.$1/' original.filename

Edit: If rename isn't available and you have to rename more than one file, shell scripting can really be short and simple for this. For example, to rename all *.jpg to prefix_*.jpg in the current directory:

for filename in *.jpg; do mv "$filename" "prefix_$filename"; done;

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