rename
will rename the specified files by replacing the first occurrence of
expression
in their name by
replacement.
OPTIONS
-s, --symlink
Do not rename a symlink but its target.
-v, --verbose
Show which files were renamed, if any.
-n, --no-act
Do not make any changes; add
--verbose
to see what would be made.
-o, --no-overwrite
Do not overwrite existing files. When
--symlink
is active, do not overwrite symlinks pointing to existing targets.
-i, --interactive
Ask before overwriting existing files.
-V, --version
Display version information and exit.
-h, --help
Display help text and exit.
EXAMPLES
Given the files
foo1, ..., foo9, foo10, ..., foo278,
the commands
rename foo foo00 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.
Provide an empty string for shortening:
rename '_with_long_name' '' file_with_long_name.*
will remove the substring in the filenames.
WARNING
The renaming has no safeguards by default or without any one of the options
--no-overwrite,
--interactive
or
--no-act.
If the user has
permission to rewrite file names, the command will perform the action without
any questions. For example, the result can be quite drastic when the command
is run as root in the /lib directory. Always make a backup before running the
command, unless you truly know what you are doing.
INTERACTIVE MODE
As most standard utilities rename can be used with a terminal device (tty in
short) in canonical mode, where the line is buffered by the tty and you press
ENTER to validate the user input. If you put your tty in cbreak mode however,
rename requires only a single key press to answer the prompt. To set cbreak
mode, run for example:
sh -c 'stty -icanon min 1; "$0" "$@"; stty icanon' rename -i from to files