Command line help for renaming many files at once

[mwade]

ello,

I am trying to rename a LARGE number of files in one dir and have the new file keep a part of their name. For instance I have about 300 files named something like this:

foo.00
foo.01
foo.02
foo.03

I want to change their name to:

foobar.00
foobar.01
foobar.02
foobar.03

I think you get the idea. I have gone over the man page and can't find a solution. I obviously do not want to rename one by one.

Thanks

[brian_p]

ello,

I am trying to rename a LARGE number of files in one dir and have the new file keep a part of their name.

man rename

Ideal for what you want to do.

[ryanhaigh]

I'm not on my ubuntu computer at the moment to try and come up with the bash script required to do this but I do have a suggestion. Assuming this isn't a server and you have a GUI installed you can use a program called pyrenamer to do what you want.

apt://pyrenamer

It's a great tool to have available particularly for instances such as this where a bash script, while more than capable, is probably not warranted for one time use.

[ghostdog74]

ello,

I am trying to rename a LARGE number of files in one dir and have the new file keep a part of their name. For instance I have about 300 files named something like this:

foo.00
foo.01
foo.02
foo.03

I want to change their name to:

foobar.00
foobar.01
foobar.02
foobar.03

I think you get the idea. I have gone over the man page and can't find a solution. I obviously do not want to rename one by one.

Thanks

Its always good to learn a bit of shell scripting. What happens when rename or pyrenamer or whatever tools you need are not available?

for files in *bar*
do
mv "$files" "${files/bar/}"
done

see my sig for learning bash links

[sengines]

look for gprename in synaptic

[kaibob]

I'm a noob at this, but I came up with the following based on posting 3 in the referenced thread. TRY IT WITH SOME TEST FILES FIRST.

for FILES in foo.* ; do
newfile=${FILES/foo/foobar}
mv "$FILES" "$newfile"
done

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=845455&highlight=script+rename

[kaibob]

Its always good to learn a bit of shell scripting. What happens when rename or pyrenamer or whatever tools you need are not available?

for files in *bar*
do
mv "$files" "${files/bar/}"
done


Ghostdog74,

I wrote my posting without seeing yours. In fact, the posting I referenced in my thread was yours.

Anyway, I'm new at this and wondered why the line of your script as shown below would work because the source files do not have "bar" in them:

for files in *bar*

kaibob

[ghostdog74]

no it will not work if there's no "bar" in your file names. I misread your requirement, so

for files in foo.*

should be correct.