Bulk renaming files with the rename command

Conclusion

Once you understand its syntax and use, the rename command is an efficient and very powerful utility for virtually any bulk renaming job you have in mind – from converting file names to title case, to moving files into different directories, to changing month numbers into month names (e.g., 2015-02-17 into 2015-Feb-17). All of these jobs and more can be performed with rename. Furthermore, several jobs can be combined into one command for even more power and flexibility.

This article has covered a number of examples to showcase the major features of rename, but I have only scratched the surface in terms of what can be done with the command. Hopefully, you will be inspired to come up with your own rename commands.

Infos

  1. Thunar: https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/start
  2. rename: https://metacpan.org/release/File-Rename
  3. Perl expressions: https://perldoc.perl.org/perlop#Regexp-Quote-Like-Operators
  4. Regular expression syntax: https://perldoc.perl.org/perlre#Regular-Expressions

The Author

Michael Williams, better known by his pseudonym Gordon Squash, is a freelance, open source software developer. He is a member of the Core Developers Team of the MATE Desktop Environment project (https://mate-desktop.org/), enjoys hacking anything related to the GTK+ GUI widget toolkit, and works toward developing a fork of GTK+ called STLWRT (https://github.com/thesquash/stlwrt) when time permits. You can see some of his other current projects on his personal GitHub page (https://github.com/thesquash/).

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