The simplest way I know. Show Sample Output

Replace 'SHOWNAME' with the name of the TV show. Add -n to test the command without renaming files. Check the 'sample output'. Show Sample Output

the "i" controls case sensitiveness. It's slightly inefficient since it uselessly renames .jpg to .jpg, but that's more than compensated by launching only one process instead of two, besides being shorter to write.

Best to try first with -n flag, to preview

This uses Perl's rename utility (you may have to call it as prename on your box) and won't choke on spaces or other characters in filenames. It will also zero pad a number even in filenames like "vacation-4.jpg".

The above one-liner could be run against all HTML files in a directory. It renames the HTML files based on the text contained in their title tag. This helped me in a situation where I had a directory containing thousands of HTML documents with meaningless filenames.

Use 'mmv' for mass renames. The globbing syntax is intuitive.

Use this command if you want to rename all subtitles for them to have the same name as the mp4 files. NOTE: The order of "ls -1 *.mp4" must match the order of "ls -1 *.srt", run the command bellow to make sure the *.srt files will really match the movies after run this command: paste -d:

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). Show Sample Output

A powerfull way to rename file using sed groups. & stand for the matched expression. \1 referes to the first group between parenthesis. \2 to the second. Show Sample Output

Good old bracket expansion :-) For large numbers of files, "rename" will spare you the for-loop, or the find/exec...

Useful if you have a list of images called 1 2 3 4 and so on, you can adapt it to rewrite it as 4 (in this example) 0-padded number. Show Sample Output

Useful if non-ascii characters in filenames have been improperly encoded. Replace "PROBLEM" with the incorrect characters (e.g. 'é'), and "FIX" with the correct ones (e.g. '?').

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".

Just a quick hack to give reasonable filenames to TrueType and OpenType fonts. I'd accumulated a big bunch of bizarrely and inconsistently named font files in my ~/.fonts directory. I wanted to copy some, but not all, of them over to my new machine, but I had no idea what many of them were. This script renames .ttf files based on the name embedded inside the font. It will also work for .otf files, but make sure you change the mv part so it gives them the proper extension. REQUIREMENTS: Bash (for extended pattern globbing), showttf (Debian has it in the fontforge-extras package), GNU grep (for context), and rev (because it's hilarious). BUGS: Well, like I said, this is a quick hack. It grew piece by piece on the command line. I only needed to do this once and spent hardly any time on it, so it's a bit goofy. For example, I find 'rev | cut -f1 | rev' pleasantly amusing --- it seems so clearly wrong, and yet it works to print the last argument. I think flexibility in expressiveness like this is part of the beauty of Unix shell scripting. One-off tasks can be be written quickly, built-up as a person is "thinking aloud" at the command line. That's why Unix is such a huge boost to productivity: it allows each person to think their own way instead of enforcing some "right way". On a tangent: One of the things I wish commandlinefu would show is the command line HISTORY of the person as they developed the script. I think it's that conversation between programmer and computer, as the pipeline is built piece-by-piece, that is the more valuable lesson than any canned script. Show Sample Output

Give files a random name (don't ask why :-) The function will rename files but maintain their extensions. BUG: If a file doesn't have an extension it will end up with a dot at the end of the name. The parameter '8' for pwgen controls the length of filenames - eight random characters. Show Sample Output

easier way to recursively change files to lowercase using rename instead

Sometimes, you don't want to just replace the spaces in the current folder, but through the whole folder tree - such as your whole music collection, perhaps. Or maybe you want to do some other renaming operation throughout a tree - this command's useful for that, too. To rename stuff through a whole directory tree, you might expect this to work: for a in `find . -name '* *'`;do mv -i "$a" ${a// /_};done No such luck. The "for" command will split its parameters on spaces unless the spaces are escaped, so given a file "foo bar", the above would not try to move the file "foo bar" to "foo_bar" but rather the file "foo" to "foo", and the file "bar" to "bar". Instead, find's -execdir and -depth arguments need to be used, to set a variable to the filename, and rename files within the directory before we rename the directory. It has to be -execdir and won't work with just -exec - that would try to rename "foo bar/baz quux" to "foo_bar/baz_quux" in one step, rather than going into "foo bar/", changing "baz quux" to "baz_quux", then stepping out and changing "foo bar/" into "foo_bar/". To rename just files, or just directories, you can put "-type f" or "-type d" after the "-depth" param. You could probably safely replace the "mv" part of the line with a "rename" command, like rename 'y/ /_/' *, but I haven't tried, since that's way less portable.