A program, or Perl script, which does regular expression-enhanced batch renaming.

Essential.

See also:

• Rename (computing)

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Usage and notes ∞

• Always test with --nono
• renumbering files
• \rename 's/(.*?)\//$1append_this/' * --nono
• How do I rename something to title-case?

• \rename 's/\((\d)\)/00/' \(?\) --nono

  • will rename (1) to 001.
• -n or --nono is to make no changes.

• Some versions will let you do rename <before> <after> <files> as with:

  • rename "a string" "another string" *

Chopping off stuff ∞

It doesn't seem particularly possible to nuke a few characters off of the beginning. In Zsh I was able to do this:

for i in *; do  \rename $i $i[7,-1] $i  --nono ; done

Didn't work for stuff with spaces in them.. so use double-quotes I figure.. maybe something like this?:

for i in *; do  \rename "$i" "$i[7,-1]" "$i" --nono ; done

Renaming with regular expressions ∞

\rename  's/\.htm$/\.html/' *.htm  --nono
\rename  's/(\w+)-(\w+)-(\d\d)-(\d{4})-NODATA.txt\$1.$4$3$2.log$//' *  --nono
\rename  'y/A-Z/a-z/' *.log  --nono

Rename the first character ∞

• If the first character ({1})

• (Any character) (.)

  • You can instead make it a number only (a "digit") (\d)
• Then change that character to 8
• Take the rest of the filename ((.*))

• And append it to that 8 ($1)

\rename 's/.{1}(.*)$/8$1/'  * --nono

Rename the first character using a variable ∞

As above, with different quoting:

REPLACE='hi' ; \rename "s/\d{1}(.*)$/$REPLACE\$1/"  * --nono

• Notice that instead of single quotes ('), this is using double-quotes (")

• Notice that $1 has become \$1.

  • This is because the example uses the double-quote (") characters surrounding the expression

Recursive, regular expression rename that respects spaces ∞

Tested and works. Also preserves .JPG if found in the middle of a filename. Unfortunately my version of "rename" doesn't allow regular expressions, so the rename isn't actually preserving. This gives horrid system lag which isn't helped by niceing.

0=$IFS ; IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b") ; for f in `find -regex '.*\.JPG$'`; do  \rename .JPG .jpg "$f"  --nono ; done ; IFS=$0

Without rename, see rename-files.sh

To only use builtins I'd have to be able to recurse using for loops.. (the "global" routine in 4DOS).

crazy stuff ∞

With Zsh..

See rename-files.sh

Alternatives ∞

• Windows: PowerRename

Untested

• https://sourceforge.net/projects/renamer/

• https://gprename.sourceforge.net/

(Perl) rename.pl ∞

(Perl)

rename.pl

• Lacks a "dry run" switch, implemented as -n elsewhere.

With Ruby ∞

(Ruby)

https://web.archive.org/web/20090303111310/http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/6249

Métamorphose ∞

2010-04-22 - (version not recorded)
2010-04-22 on Unity Linux 2010 rc1 64bit, updated 2010-02-15.

https://file-folder-ren.sourceforge.net/

smart install wxPythonGTK

seems to work well enough.. way too convoluted.

Renameutils ∞

• http://www.nongnu.org/renameutils/

  • commandline, should be good!

\smart-root install readline-devel

didn't get the hang of it..

Last updated 2024-07-01 at 15:10:04