Rename multiple files based on pattern in Unix

Question

There are several ways, but using rename will probably be the easiest.

Using one version of rename:

rename 's/^fgh/jkl/' fgh*

Using another version of rename (same as Judy2K's answer):

rename fgh jkl fgh*

You should check your platform's man page to see which of the above applies.

This is how sed and mv can be used together to do rename:

for f in fgh*; do mv "$f" $(echo "$f" | sed 's/^fgh/jkl/g'); done

As per comment below, if the file names have spaces in them, quotes may need to surround the sub-function that returns the name to move the files to:

for f in fgh*; do mv "$f" "$(echo $f | sed 's/^fgh/jkl/g')"; done

rename might not be in every system. so if you don't have it, use the shell this example in bash shell

for f in fgh*; do mv "$f" "${f/fgh/xxx}";done

Using mmv:

mmv "fgh*" "jkl#1"

There are many ways to do it (not all of these will work on all unixy systems):

• ls | cut -c4- | xargs -I§ mv fgh§ jkl§

  The § may be replaced by anything you find convenient. You could do this with find -exec too but that behaves subtly different on many systems, so I usually avoid that

• for f in fgh*; do mv "$f" "${f/fgh/jkl}";done

  Crude but effective as they say

• rename 's/^fgh/jkl/' fgh*

  Real pretty, but rename is not present on BSD, which is the most common unix system afaik.

• rename fgh jkl fgh*

• ls | perl -ne 'chomp; next unless -e; $o = $_; s/fgh/jkl/; next if -e; rename $o, $_';

  If you insist on using Perl, but there is no rename on your system, you can use this monster.

Some of those are a bit convoluted and the list is far from complete, but you will find what you want here for pretty much all unix systems.