DaemonForums - View Single Post - Regular expressions: renaming files with 'sed'

Carpetsmoker · #26 **(View Single Post)** 15th October 2010

I just discovered that on the Linux system at work here has the "rename" command.

According to the manpage it's part of the "util-linux-ng" package.

Code:

RENAME(1)                  Linux Programmer’s Manual                 RENAME(1)



NAME
       rename - Rename files

SYNOPSIS
       rename from to file...
       rename -V

DESCRIPTION
       rename will rename the specified files by replacing the first occurrence of from in their name by to.


       -V, --version
              Display version information and exit.


       For example, given the files
              foo1, ..., foo9, foo10, ..., foo278, the commands

              rename foo foo0 foo?
              rename foo foo0 foo??

       will turn them into foo001, ..., foo009, foo010, ..., foo278.

       And
              rename .htm .html *.htm

       will fix the extension of your html files.


SEE ALSO
       mmv(1), mv(1)

AVAILABILITY
       The rename command is part of the util-linux-ng package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-
       ng/.



                                1 January 2000                       RENAME(1)

Seems to be installed by default on fedora core 11.

For example to replace all underscores with a plus: $ rename '_' '+' *

One page I found on the internet (Which is about something different entirly and just mentions this command) used a regular expression, but that doesn't seem to work for me. Didn't research it.