[one-liner]: Renaming a Set of Files in Bash
slmingol posted this in
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June 20th, 2009, @ 12:36 amI do this command from time to time so I wanted to just jot it down so I didn’t have to go recreating every 6 months that I seem to need it. The setup for this example is that I had created a bunch of screenshots named ss#.png and I wanted to rename them to ss_centos5_raid_setup_#.png, where “#” is a numeric value.
Initial Set of Files
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| # Here what the directory looks like to start
% ls
ss01.png
ss02.png
ss03.png
ss04.png
ss05.png
ss06.png
ss07.png
ss08.png
ss09.png
ss10.png
ss11.png
ss12.png
ss13.png |
New File Names
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| # and here's what our command will generate for new names
# NOTE: this instance of the command is for debug purposes only
#
% for old in *; do new="`echo $old | sed 's/ss/ss_centos5_raid_setup_/'`"; echo $new; done
ss_centos5_raid_setup_01.png
ss_centos5_raid_setup_02.png
ss_centos5_raid_setup_03.png
ss_centos5_raid_setup_04.png
ss_centos5_raid_setup_05.png
ss_centos5_raid_setup_06.png
ss_centos5_raid_setup_07.png
ss_centos5_raid_setup_08.png
ss_centos5_raid_setup_09.png
ss_centos5_raid_setup_10.png
ss_centos5_raid_setup_11.png
ss_centos5_raid_setup_12.png
ss_centos5_raid_setup_13.png |
Moving $old to $new
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| # and here's the final command that will do all the lifting
for old in *; do new="`echo $old | sed 's/ss/ss_centos5_raid_setup_/'`"; mv $old $new; done |
The general form of this command
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| for old in *; do new="`echo $old | sed 's/<old prefix>/<new prefix>/'`"; mv $old $new; done |
NOTE: For further details regarding my one-liner blog posts, check out my one-liner style guide primer.
June 20th, 2009, @ 12:36 am |
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