Batch renaming files

Question

I have a directory full of images:

image0001.png
image0002.png
image0003.png
...

And I would like a one-liner to rename them to (say).

0001.png
0002.png
0003.png
...

How do I do this?

Answer 1

If you are using bash:

for f in *.png; do mv "$f" "${f#image}"; done

Answer 2

ls *png | while read -r f; do f2="`echo $f | sed -e's/image//'`"; mv $f $f2; done

Answer 3

This has worked. Perl's rename:

rename -v 's/image//' *.png

Answer 4

zmv

The zsh shell has a powerful batch rename command called zmv.

First you need to enable the zmv command as follows (this can go into your ~/.zshrc).

autoload zmv

The basic syntax is zmv PATTERN REPLACEMENT. The pattern is a shell glob expression. Parts of the pattern can be surrounded by parentheses. The replacement text can contain $1, $2, etc. to refer to the Nth parenthesised group in the pattern. For example:

zmv 'image(*.png)' '$1'

You can also ask zsh to automatically define $1, $2, etc. to match the wildcard characters in the pattern:

zmv -w 'image*.png' '$1.png'

Answer 5

I like Perl so:

perl -nlE '$old=$_; s/image//; qx(mv $old $_)'

You can also use the same pattern for other tasks like copying the files to another directory:

perl -nlE '$old=$_; s(image)(/path/to/new/dir/); qx(mv $old $_)'

Answer 6

I normally use the nice and simple mmv utility for this usecase:

$ mmv "image*.png" "#1.png"

will perform your task.

The #1 in the target pattern will be substituted with whatever matches the wildcard in the source pattern. This also works for several wildcards and can be used for example to change the order of parts of filenames. You can also easily do more complicated things like converting lower case to upper case letters.

Make sure to protect the patterns from the shell by quoting.

Answer 7

for file in *.*@coral-no-serve; do mv "$file" "`echo $file | sed 's/@coral-no-serve//g'`"; done