Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for:

» all commands
» commands with 3 up-votes (commandlinefu3)
» commands with 10 up-votes (commandlinefu10)
» commands using rename

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation: Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands: To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner: Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed: Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Commands using rename

Terminal - Commands using rename - 52 results

rename 's/ /-/g' *

2010-10-23 17:03:54

User: depesz

Functions: rename

Up
Down

Replace spaces in a filename with hyphens

As long as you have perl based rename. You can check:

=$ rename --help

Unknown option: help

Usage: rename [-v] [-n] [-f] perlexpr [filenames]

That's the good one.

Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find /home -print -exec rename -v 's/_2009-09-04.suffix$//' {} \;

2010-09-05 13:38:48

User: Trebacz

Functions: find rename

Tags: find rename

Up
Down

Find all files under a certain directory /home that have a certain suffix at the end of the file name. Show the file and rename them to remove the suffix.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

rename 'y/ /_/' *

2010-08-31 22:41:41

User: binfalse

Functions: rename

Up
Down

Convert spaces in file names to underscores

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

rename 's/\b((?!(a|of|that|to)\b)[a-z]+)/\u$1/g' *

2010-08-22 15:00:33

User: John_W

Functions: rename

Tags: file rename title case

Up
Down

Title Case Files

All words of the filenames except "a", "of", "that" and "to" are capitalized.

To also match words which begin with a specific string, you can use this:

rename 's/\b((?!hello\b|t)[a-z]+)/\u$1/g' *

This will capitalize all words except "hello" and words beginning with "t".

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

rename 's/\b([a-z])/\u$1/g' *

2010-08-22 14:15:59

User: John_W

Functions: rename

Tags: file rename title case

Up
Down

Title Case Files

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

rename 's/(^|[\s\[\]_-])([a-z])/$1\u$2/g' *

2010-08-22 11:26:20

User: l0b0

Functions: rename

Tags: file rename title case

Up
Down

Title Case Files

Anyone know how to avoid title casing some words, like 'to', 'of', 'that', etc.?

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

rename 's/foo/bar/g' foobar

2010-08-19 03:33:13

User: unixmonkey11428

Functions: rename

Tags: bash

Up
Down

replace strings in file names

Uses vi style search / replace in bash to rename files. Works with regex's too (I use the following a script to fixup / shorten file names):

# Remove complete parenthetical/bracket/brace phrases

rename 's/$.*$//g' *

rename 's/\[.*\]//g' *

rename 's/\{.*\}//g' *

rename 's/ /_/g' *

2010-01-29 21:15:03

User: tuxilicious

Functions: rename

Tags: bash

Up
Down

Replace spaces in filenames with underscores

It's the rename-tool from debians perl-package.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find /path/to/images -name '*.JPG' -exec rename "s/.JPG/.jpg/g" \{\} \;

2010-01-02 19:12:37

User: renich

Functions: find rename

Tags: find rename

Up
Down

Rename .JPG to .jpg recursively

This command is useful for renaming a clipart, pic gallery or your photo collection. It will only change the big caps to small ones (on the extension).

rename "s/ *//g" *.jpg

2010-01-02 16:54:19

User: Vasudev

Functions: rename

Up
Down

Replace space in filename

This commands removes space from all the files with specific extension. I've specifed *.jpg as an example.

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *

2009-10-11 11:36:07

User: Karakh

Functions: rename

Tags: rename

Up
Down

convert filenames in current directory to lowercase

The simplest way I know.

find my_root_dir -depth -exec rename 's/(.*)\/([^\/]*)/$1\/\L$2/' {} \;

2009-10-11 07:09:06

User: evalinux

Functions: find rename

Up
Down

convert filenames in current directory to lowercase

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

rename -v 's/.*[s,S](\d{2}).*[e,E](\d{2}).*\.avi/SHOWNAME\ S$1E$2.avi/' poorly.named.file.s01e01.avi

2009-09-29 16:39:57

User: Karakh

Functions: rename

Tags: Ubuntu avi rename TV

Up
Down

Clean up poorly named TV shows.

Replace 'SHOWNAME' with the name of the TV show.

Add -n to test the command without renaming files.

Check the 'sample output'.

rename -v 's/ /_/g' *

2009-08-28 17:28:57

User: fsilveira

Functions: rename

Tags: rename

Up
Down

Replace spaces in filenames with underscores

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

rename 's/^/prefix/' *

2009-08-14 03:26:45

User: lingo

Functions: rename

Tags: Debian rename prefix

Up
Down

Add prefix onto filenames

Best to try first with -n flag, to preview

Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

exiv2 rename *.jpg

2009-08-10 22:11:19

User: unixmonkey5069

Functions: rename

Up
Down

Picture Renamer

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find -name '*oldname*' -print0 | xargs -0 rename 's/oldname/newname/'

2009-07-27 00:44:06

User: goodevilgenius

Functions: find rename xargs

Up
Down

Recursive replace of directory and file names in the current directory.

This is better than doing a "for `find ...`; do ...; done", if any of the returned filenames have a space in them, it gets mangled. This should be able to handle any files.

Of course, this only works if you have rename installed on your system, so it's not a very portable command.

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

rename 'y/ /_/' *

2009-06-27 22:20:47

User: signal9

Functions: rename

Tags: file rename

Up
Down

replace spaces in filenames with underscores

This command will replace all the spaces in all the filenames of the current directory with underscores. There are other commands that do this here, but this one is the easiest and shortest.

Comments (9) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

rename 's/.*/[it]$&/' *.pdf

2009-03-27 15:12:02

User: kayowas

Functions: rename

Up
Down

Adds characters at the beginning of the name of a file

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find ./ -name '*.JPG' -type f -execdir rename -f 'y/A-Z/a-z/' {} \+

2009-03-27 13:49:56

User: pronoiaque

Functions: find rename

Up
Down

Change files case, without modify directories, recursively

Change files case, without modify directories, recursively.

... fucking vfat

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

ls -1 | rename 's/\ /_/'

2009-03-17 17:33:41

User: servermanaged

Functions: ls rename

Up
Down

Substitute spaces in filename with underscore

Substitute spaces in filename with underscore, it work on the first space encountered.

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

ls -1 | grep " " | awk '{printf("mv \"%s\" ",$0); gsub(/ /,"_",$0); printf("%s\n",$0)}' | sh # rename filenames: spaces to "_"

2009-03-15 18:42:43

User: mpb

Functions: awk grep ls rename sh

Up
Down

Convert embedded spaces in filenames to "_" (underscore)

This command converts filenames with embedded spaces in the current directory replacing spaces with the underscore ("_") character.

rename .JPG .jpg *.JPG

2009-03-10 15:07:24

User: psytek

Functions: rename

Up
Down

Change the extension of a filename by using rename to convert

This will change all files ending in .JPG to .jpg and will work with any file extension

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *

2009-02-22 20:42:10

User: dakira

Functions: rename

Up
Down

convert uppercase files to lowercase files

Comments (7) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find ./ -name '*' -exec rename 's/\s+/_/g' {} \;

2009-02-16 09:52:15

User: pamindic

Functions: find rename

Up
Down

Find recursively, from current directory down, files and directories whose names contain single or multiple whitespaces and replace each such occurrence with a single underscore.

Note the g for global in the perl expression; without it, only the first occurrence in the name would be replaced.

< 1 2 3 >