Bulk rename, change prefix

Question

How can I bulk replace the prefix for many files?

I have a lot of files like

• TestSRConnectionContext.h
• TestSRConnectionContext.m

I would like to change all them to

• CLConnectionContext.h
• CLConnectionContext.m

How would I do this?

Answer 1

for name in TestSR*
do
    newname=CL"$(echo "$name" | cut -b7-)"
    mv "$name" "$newname"
done

Answer 2

Shell parameter expansion is enough for simple transformations like this. Command substitution is less efficient because of the need to spawn extra processes (for the command substitution itself and the cut/sed).

for f in TestSR*; do mv "$f" "CL${f#TestSR}"; done

Answer 3

I'd say the simplest it to just use the rename command. See it's man page (it's as simple as it gets) but for changing extensions the following should work just fine:

rename 's/^TestSR/CL/' *

This of course expects you to be on the directory of the files. This will not overwrite files. If you want that, just pass the -f option.

EDIT: see jw013 comment below about multiple versions of rename

Answer 4

Well, it wasn't as hard as i though.

$ for f in TestSR*.m; do mv $f CL$(echo $f | cut -c7-); done;
$ for f in TestSR*.h; do mv $f CL$(echo $f | cut -c7-); done;

Answer 5

If you need something more perlish you can do this

perl -e 'for(@ARGV) { rename($_, $n) if( ($n = $_ ) =~ s/^TestSR/CL/) }' *

Answer 6

Here's one way:

ls *.{h,m} | while read a; do n=CL$(echo $a | sed -e 's/^Test//'); mv $a $n; done

• ls *.{h,m} --> Find all files with .h or .m extension
• n=CL --> Add a CL prefix to the file name
• sed -e 's/^Test//' --> Removes the Test prefix from the file name
• mv $a $n --> Performs the rename

Answer 7

You can try with:

for i in TestSR*; do mv ${i} ${i/#TestSR/CL}; done

See man bash (section "Parameter Expansion") for details.