Bulk renaming files with the rename command
Names Have Been Changed
© Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash
The rename command is a powerful means to simultaneously rename or even move multiple files following a given pattern.
Users often have to rename a collection of related files according to a specific pattern. You might have logfiles with dates and times in the file name, but the dates are not written in your preferred format (20230315 instead of 15-03-2023). Perhaps you have a collection of digital photos from your camera, or maybe you are working with files created on an old Microsoft Windows or MS-DOS system that are all uppercase, and you want to give them more readable file names.
Changing the names of a few files by hand may be manageable, but changing more than a dozen files quickly becomes not only tedious but error-prone. Linux does have some tools that will rename files in bulk. Most notably, the Thunar file manager [1] has a very flexible Bulk Rename tool (Figure 1), with several powerful built-in pattern-matching criteria from which to choose, making the tool sufficient for most use cases.
Once you get used to the command line, renaming files with a text-based command is usually faster than using a graphical tool. Plus, Thunar's Bulk Rename tool, although powerful, is still limited in its flexibility. For example, while Bulk Rename can rename files, it usually cannot move files from one directory or group of directories to another.
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