Segmentation Fault: Core dumped..;-)

HOWTO: Renaming a group of files on your Linux machine

Posted : July 15, 2004 at 1:45 pm [America/Los_Angeles]

Found myself confronted with another pesky problem this morning.

Goal:

Rename a group of files in a folder (and possibly sub-folders)

Example:

You’ve a folder which has files looking like this:

[user@myhost tmp]> ls
test1.txt  test2.txt  test3.txt readme.txt

Let’s say you want to rename the files starting with test as blah1.txt, blah2.txt and blah3.txt respectively.

Solution:

Approach 1: Using ‘rename’ command

In RedHat distribution, there is a utility called rename. You can use it as follows:

[user@host tmp]> ls
test1.txt  test2.txt  test3.txt readme.txt
[user@host tmp]> rename test blah test*.txt
[user@host tmp]> ls
blah1.txt  blah2.txt  blah3.txt readme.txt

Basically, rename will rename the specified files (test*.txt) by replacing the first occurrence (and first occurence only) of test in their name by blah. In other words, the command-line parameters of rename are:

1. pattern of the filename that needs to be replaced/changed (in our example, test)
2. pattern that #1 (found above) will be replaced with (in our example, blah)
3. all files that need to be considered for such renaming (in our example, files matching the pattern test*.txt)

Approach 2: Using a shell script

In case you don’t have the rename utility on your flavor of Linux/Unix, you can use this simple bash script:

#!/bin/bash

for cur in $(find . -name 'test*.txt'); do
   new=`echo $cur | sed 's/test/blah/'`
   mv $cur $new
done

The advantage here is that this will traverse the sub-folders as well (unlike rename).

- Anand

Category: How do I?