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

Question

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 1

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:

• Easily renaming multiple files

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