rename files with rename command

Question

Please advice what is wrong with the following command

find /tmp/dir -name "* *" -type f | rename 's/*/fixed_/g'

remark - I prefer to do that with one command not loop syntax

What I want is to rename all the files under /tmp/dir , by adding the name fixed_ before each file

For example ( the files )

Fevc.txt
Ddve.txt

Should rename to:

fixed_Fevc.txt
fixed_Ddve.txt

Answer 1

Temporary note: there is something wrong - the rename pattern does not handle filenames with path; I'm working on a fix

What is wrong in your command is two things:

find /tmp/dir -name "* *" -type f | rename 's/*/fixed_/g'

• The -name "* *" matches only file names with a space in it - that's not what you want, right?

  • the solution is to just leave it out; We do not want to exclude files matching some name - we want all.

• The rename pattern is wrong in two ways

  • you used a shell glob pattern, but it needs to be a regular expression, in short a regex (It can be some general perl expression - let's ignore it and use only s///g)
  • the fixed pattern would match the complete name, and replace it with fixed_. You want to "replace" the "first 0 characters" with fixed_, technically. That's the start of the line, matched with ^. We can leave out the g because there is only one replacement needed per line.

Putting it together, it looks like this:

find /tmp/dir -type f | rename 's/^/fixed_/'

Answer 2

It seems your system features the older version of rename that doesn't use regular expressions. You can rename your files with

cd /tmp/dir/
for f in *\ * ; do
    [[ -f $f ]] && mv "$f" fixed_"$f"
done

(untested)

For the rename command with regex support, you have to change the regular expression: * needs something to operate on, it means "repeat the previous thing zero or more times". You don't want to replace anything, you want to prepend, so use ^ which stands for the beginning of the string:

rename 's/^/fixed_/'

Answer 3

If anyone's interested in a zsh solution

 cd /tmp/dir
 for f (*(.)) mv $f fixed_$f

where (.) means files only

A simpler case

 for f (*.txt) mv $f fixed_$f