Rename multiple files, but only rename part of the filename in Bash

Question

I know how I can rename files and such, but I'm having trouble with this.

I only need to rename test-this in a for loop.

test-this.ext test-this.volume001+02.ext test-this.volume002+04.ext  test-this.volume003+08.ext  test-this.volume004+16.ext  test-this.volume005+32.ext  test-this.volume006+64.ext  test-this.volume007+78.ext  

Answer 1

If you have all of these files in one folder and you're on Linux you can use:

rename 's/test-this/REPLACESTRING/g' * 

The result will be:

REPLACESTRING.ext REPLACESTRING.volume001+02.ext REPLACESTRING.volume002+04.ext ... 

rename can take a command as the first argument. The command here consists of four parts:

1. s: flag to substitute a string with another string,
2. test-this: the string you want to replace,
3. REPLACESTRING: the string you want to replace the search string with, and
4. g: a flag indicating that all matches of the search string shall be replaced, i.e. if the filename is test-this-abc-test-this.ext the result will be REPLACESTRING-abc-REPLACESTRING.ext.

Refer to man sed for a detailed description of the flags.

Answer 2

Use rename as shown below:

rename test-this foo test-this* 

This will replace test-this with foo in the file names.

If you don't have rename use a for loop as shown below:

for i in test-this* do     mv "$i" "${i/test-this/foo}" done