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

I'd say the simplest it to just use the rename command which is common on many Linux distributions. There are two common versions of this command so check its man page to find which one you have:

## rename from Perl (default in Debian systems -- Ubuntu, Mint, ...)
rename 's/^TestSR/CL/' TestSR*

## rename from util-linux-ng (common in Fedora systems, Red Hat, CentOS, ...)
rename TestSR CL TestSR*

Using a TestSR* shell wildcard as opposed to just * helps in that it potentially passes far fewer file names to rename and reduces the risk of running into a Argument list too long error, but also and more importantly avoids problems when there are file names that start with - in the current working directory. It's particularly important for some of the perl-based variants of rename where not doing so introduces command injection vulnerabilities.

Answer 2

for name in TestSR*
do
    newname=CL"$(echo "$name" | cut -c7-)"
    mv "$name" "$newname"
done

This uses bash command substitution to remove the first 6 characters from the input filename via cut, prepends CL to the result, and stores that in $newname. Then it renames the old name to the new name. This is performed on every file.

cut -c7- specifies that only characters after index 7 should be returned from the input. 7- is a range starting at index 7 with no end; that is, until the end of the line.

Previously, I had used cut -b7-, but -c should be used instead to handle character encodings that could have multiple bytes per character, like UTF-8.

Answer 3

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 4

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 5

You can try with:

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

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

Should also work in ksh93 (where that syntax initially comes from) and zsh.

Answer 6

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 7

If you need something more perlish you can do this

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

Answer 8

I don't like any of the answers. My take is that you want a vanilla bash solution. So here you go!

Try this with echo first to see what is going to happen! Test your command before you use it on thousands of files!

Remove the './' is you want to put a prefix find . -type f -exec bash -c 'echo prefix_${0#./}' {} \;

Remove the extension if you want to put something after it find . -type f -exec bash -c 'echo ${0%.*}_suffix.${0##*.}' {} \;

Now to use this to rename just replace echo with mv $0

EXAMPLE: find . -type f -exec bash -c 'mv $0 1.${0#./}' {} \;

Inspired by: https://gist.github.com/larshaendler/723d2ec447c3c694b71dc6e3bc3aadc9

Answer 9

Obligatory answer using zsh's zmv:

autoload -Uz zmv # best in ~/.zshrc
zmv -n 'TestSR(*.[hm])' 'CL$1'

Remove the -n (for dry-run) if happy.