Regex to batch rename files in OS X Terminal

Question

I'm after a way to batch rename files with a regex i.e.

s/123/onetwothree/g 

I recall i can use awk and sed with a regex but couldnt figure out how to pipe them together for the desired output.

Answer 1

You can install perl based rename utility:

brew install rename 

and than just use it like:

rename 's/123/onetwothree/g' * 

if you'd like to test your regex without renaming any files just add -n switch

Answer 2

An efficient way to perform the rename operation is to construct the rename commands in a sed pipeline and feed them into the shell.

ls | sed -n 's/\(.*\)\(123\)\(.*\)/mv "\1\2\3" "\1onetwothree\2"/p' | sh