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replace strings in file names

Terminal - replace strings in file names
rename 's/foo/bar/g' foobar
2010-08-19 03:33:13
User: unixmonkey11428
Functions: rename
2
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' *

Show sample output | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 3 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
for i in $(find . -name *replaceme*);do mv "$i" "${i//replaceme/withme}"; done
2010-08-19 03:22:15
User: lefnire
Functions: find mv
Tags: bash
-5
Up
Down
replace strings in file names

rename is a great command, but can't get it to work on mac.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

Which rename can do this? On Fedora 13, "man rename" says nothing about regexp, only plain text replacements.

which rename

/usr/bin/rename

rename --version

rename (util-linux-ng 2.17.2)

man rename

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_.

Comment by sklm 147 weeks and 5 days ago

Right, it wouldn't have that in the rename command. The ability to do the search/replace using regex's is actually a function of the bash shell, which uses the sed style syntax and is handled during the globbing / expansion process.

Comment by unixmonkey11428 147 weeks and 5 days ago

I thought rename was a perl script that took a regex and a list of file names as argiments.

Comment by kaedenn 147 weeks and 5 days ago

I think you're right kaedenn:

rename -v

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

cat $(which rename) | head -n 1

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

Comment by cicatriz 147 weeks and 5 days ago

Yup, you guys are correct, it is a perl script, and is taking a perl regex. My bad on that...

Comment by unixmonkey11428 147 weeks and 5 days ago

Your point of view

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