How To Rename Multiple Files Together in Linux Using 3 Methods

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• Binny V A June 12, 2009, 12:24 pm

  Thanks for the midnight commander tip – I did not know that. Anyway, I recommend using KRename for this – really nifty tool.

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• Iftikhar Ul Hassan June 12, 2009, 12:59 pm

  Hi, that’s really nice, thanks for the great post.

  But have you tried using the “mmv” command (multiple move). This utility is not part of linux standard command set (I don’t know why) but it’s really nice.

  So you just need to install the utility

  hassan@linux:~$ sudo apt-get install mmv

  Then you can move multiple files very easily, here is an example.

  ==>I want to rename all files which have extension *.htm to *.html<==

  hassan@linux:~$ mmv “*.htm ” “#1.html”

  You can read more about it from the excellent tutorial here (http://linux.dsplabs.com.au/mmv-copy-append-link-move-multiple-files-under-linux-shell-bash-by-wildcard-patterns-p5/)

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• !ncognito June 13, 2009, 8:41 am

  1st method seems dead simple.. Nice post!

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• NARDI June 13, 2009, 2:57 pm

  wow.. didn’t know that rename is so powerfull. I’ll try to use it instead of my favourite
  for f in * ; do mv “$f” “${f//foo/bar}” ; done
  I’m not sure if it was mentioned here before but JFYI:

  f=foofoo.foo

  #replace first
  echo ${f/foo/bar} # -> barfoo.foo

  #replace all occurences
  echo ${f//foo/bar} # -> barbar.bar

  #replace first match from the beginning
  echo ${f#f*f} # -> oo.foo
  #notice the ‘star’ consumes only ‘oo’ here

  #replace all (longest match of regexp) from the beginning
  echo ${f##f*f} # -> oo
  #here, there is ‘oofoo.’ hidden under the ‘star’ in regex ‘f*f’

  #extension replacement
  echo ${f%foo}bar # -> foofoo.bar

  #replace first from the end
  echo ${f%oo*} # -> foofoo.f

  #replace all (longest match of regexp) from the end
  echo ${f%%oo*} # -> f

  enjoy =)

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• Nabin Limbu June 14, 2009, 12:16 am

  Hi,

  There are lots of time when we require to swap files between two configuration files. Is there any single command which will swap two files instead of writing 3 commands like this: mv abc.txt tmp.txt; mv def.txt abc.txt; mv tmp.txt def.txt

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• Flynets June 14, 2009, 8:07 am

  Replace space char with underscore from files
  find . -type f -iname “*.mp3” -exec rename “s/ /_/g” {} \;

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• Ramesh Natarajan June 14, 2009, 11:33 pm

  @Binny,

  Thanks for the information about KRename, which definitely a very useful tool.
   

  For those who have not used KRename, check-out some screenshots of Krename
   

  @Iftikhar,

  Thanks for the info. mmv looks similar to rename. Is there anything special that mmv does which rename cannot do? (or) Is it pretty much the same?

   

  @Nardi,

  Your for-loop is similar to the method-2. Thanks for showing your detailed examples on how you do the move.

   

  @Nabin,

  I’m not sure whether there is a single command that will do the swap. I hope someone else can throw some ideas on your question. One thing that came to my mind is — Instead of doing multiple mv’s probably you can create a alias called mvswap which can have the multiple mv commands.

   
  @Flynets,

  Replacing space in a filename with underscore or hypen in a common requirement. Thanks for sharing your great example to solve that problem.

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• Nick Stoianov December 2, 2009, 5:02 pm

  FYI: rename command in RedHat DOES NOT accept perl regular expressions. So…..the command: rename s/.html/.htm/ *.html WILL NOT work on RedHat.

  If you want to use regex on Redhat in renaming files – use: ren

  Example: /usr/local/bin/ren ‘s/ //g’ *.txt

  This example will remove all the white spaces from the text files in a directory.

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• john.dennis@mailcatch.com January 4, 2011, 2:09 pm

  None of these examples appear to work in xandros linux (eeepc) except midnight commander which is so klunky I am frightened of using it.
  Why is it SO difficult to rename multiple files in linux when it is so easy in DOS ?’
  When i chose linux for my netbook I was swayed by the supposed easy availability of thousands of free programs. Well I can’t find a free program which will rename files – such a common requirement, and none of the command line solutions appear to work. (including chcase ) Does anyone know of one? Is it Xandros that is the problem?
  There are dozens for Windoze….I did see in one forum where somebody actually suggested changing the file names manually one by one. Shome joke shurely?

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• nardi January 5, 2011, 3:07 am

  to john.dennis@mailcatch.com:
  Hi John. From your complaints we can hardly figure out how to help. It might be just a little misunderstanding or nonstandard behavior.
  Could you please be more specific about what commands did you run and what output did you get? It would also be nice to know what shell are you using (type in “echo $SHELL”) just to make sure it unedrstands bash commands.
  Yeah and how is this done in DOS actually?

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• richard January 6, 2011, 1:57 pm

  In response to Nick, removing the s/ and all subsequent /’s using a space separator with Fedora worked perfectly.

  rename .html .htm *.html

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• reet November 6, 2012, 8:37 am

  in ubuntu server is working this version
  [code]
  rename ‘s|was|new|g’ /target/dir
  [code]
  it does the job ex cept removing the space from filenames

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• @ropherpanama May 25, 2013, 1:41 pm

  Hey! In CentOS you can type :
  rename abc 123 * and all the files in your directory that contain the abc string will be replace with 123, it’s really nice! Thanks!

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