Rename all files in a folder with a prefix in a single command

linux unix rename
vasanthi picture vasanthi · Jun 13, 2011 · Viewed 169.4k times · Source

Rename all the files within a folder with prefix "Unix_"

Suppose a folder has two files 

a.txt
b.pdf

then they both should be renamed from a single command to 

Unix_a.txt
Unix_b.pdf

Answer

miku picture miku · Jun 13, 2011

If your filenames contain no whitepace and you don't have any subdirectories, you can use a simple for loop:

$ for FILENAME in *; do mv $FILENAME Unix_$FILENAME; done

Otherwise use the convenient rename command (which is a perl script) - although it might not be available out of the box on every Unix (e.g. OS X doesn't come with rename).

A short overview at debian-administration.org:

If your filenames contain whitespace it's easier to use find, on Linux the following should work:

$ find . -type f -name '*' -printf "echo mv '%h/%f' '%h/Unix_%f\n'" | sh

On BSD systems, there is no -printf option, unfortunately. But GNU findutils should be installable (on e.g. Mac OS X with brew install findutils). 

$ gfind . -type f -name '*' -printf "mv \"%h/%f\" \"%h/Unix_%f\"\n" | sh

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