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.

Figure 1: The Bulk Rename tool features many advanced capabilities, but it may not be as efficient as a command-line tool in the hands of an experienced user.

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.

This article takes a deep look at the rename command [2], a very powerful command-line tool written in Perl that you can use for bulk renaming and a whole lot more.

Getting Started

If you don't have rename on your system, you can install it on Debian, Ubuntu, and derivatives with the following command:

sudo apt install rename

The rename command has the following syntax:

rename [options] [expression] [files]

The files are one or more files to rename. As with other command-line tools, standard shell wildcards such as *.png or file[0-9] are permitted.

The expression consists of commands to match and change parts of the file names; the results of applying the expression to each file name are used to give the file a new name. Usually, you will specify only one command – the s/// command for searching (or, less often, the y/// command for exchanging or transliterating individual letters) – to change uppercase file names to lowercase.

However, the expression can actually be almost any valid Perl code that operates on strings. If you are interested in Perl expressions, see the official Perl documentation [3]. However, it is unlikely that you'll need more than the s/// and y/// commands for changing file names.

In addition, rename accepts one or more options (see Table 1 for the most useful options).

A Basic Example

For my first example, I have some HTML files of Wikipedia articles that I downloaded using my web browser (see Listing 1). My web browser conveniently named each web page after the page's title. However, each page's title (and thus file name) ends with a hyphen followed by the word "Wikipedia," which is redundant and unnecessarily lengthens the name of each file.

$ ls -N
IEEE 754 - Wikipedia.html
Iron oxide - Wikipedia.html
Key Code Qualifier - Wikipedia.html
Wikipedia - Wikipedia.html

To remove the trailing "Wikipedia" and the hyphen, I will search for files whose names end with a space, a hyphen, another space, the word "Wikipedia," and the string ".html" and replace all that with just the string ".html" using the following command:

rename 's/ - Wikipedia\.html$/.html/' *.html

The s/// command searches for the part of the file name matching a pattern (enclosed between the first two slash characters as shown in annotation 1 in Figure 2) and replaces the matched text with some other text (enclosed between the second and third slashes, annotation 2 in Figure 2). Listing 2 shows the results of running this s/// command.

01 $ rename 's/ - Wikipedia\.html$/.html/' *.html
02 $ ls -N
03 IEEE 754.html
04 Iron oxide.html
05 Key Code Qualifier.html
06 Wikipedia.html

Figure 2: A simple but typical rename command: The command searches for the search text (1) and replaces any occurrence of it with the replacement text (2) in each of the supplied file names (3).

Note the backslash (\) character preceding the dot character (.) in the search term (line 1 of Listing 2). The search expression uses regular expression syntax [4], and the dot character has a special meaning in regular expressions. When not preceded by a backslash (known as an escape), a dot character will match not only a single dot character in the file name, but will match any kind of character. If I had not escaped the dot and had instead searched for simply - Wikipedia.html with a leading space, the search expression would have matched files (again all with leading spaces) named - Wikipedia.html, - Wikipediazhtml, - Wikipedia!html, and so on.

In practice, the set of files I want to rename contains nothing besides files of the form [x] - Wikipedia.html, so escaping the dot character is unnecessary in this case. However, when formulating search terms, it is good to be as specific as possible.

The dot character is one of several metacharacters that have a special meaning in regular expressions (see Table 2). The dollar sign ($) at the end of the search expression tells rename to match part of a file name only if the match occurs at the end of the file name.

For example, the file Key Code Qualifier -- Wikipedia.html would be matched by the regular expression I used in Listing 2, but the file Z - Wikipedia.html.gz (which includes an extra trailing .gz) would not be matched. As with the dot character, to match a literal dollar sign character in the file name, the dollar sign must be preceded by a backslash.

You may also specify one or more characters following the final slash in the s/// command. These characters further modify the behavior of the search-and-replace operation, such as disabling case-sensitive matching (see the "s/// Options" box for details on the options supported by the s/// command.)

Using Back References

Renaming files using simple search terms and regular expressions is sufficient in most cases. Most of the time, it suffices to simply add or remove a fixed string to each file name, as in the example of the downloaded Wikipedia pages.

However, sometimes it may be useful to rename files in more sophisticated ways. In the following example, as shown in Listing 3, I have a number of logfiles in a directory, all with dates and times in their names. Each file name contains the year, month, day, hour, minute, and second at which the logfile was created, in that order – roughly the convention of ISO 8601, the international format for dates and times.

$ ls -N
daemon_20200309_071842
messages_20211213_134327
messages_20230402_093200
syslog_20191013_233611
syslog_20220726_185603

But suppose I were European and I wanted the dates and times formatted in my local date convention, which is the day followed by the month and finally the year. In addition, I want hyphens inserted between each of the date components (day-month-year) and colons inserted between each time component (hours:minutes:seconds), as in syslog_26-07-2022_18:56:03. Listing 4 shows what I want the file names to look like after renaming the files.

$ ls -N
daemon_09-03-2020_07:18:42
messages_13-12-2021_13:43:27
messages_02-04-2023_09:32:00
syslog_13-10-2019_23:36:11
syslog_26-07-2022_18:56:03

Renaming the files in this manner is not possible using just the simple regular expression syntax. For this purpose, you not only need to search for specific parts of the file name, but also reference in the replacement string the matching text of each of those parts. First, you need to search for the year (a four-digit number) followed by the month (a two-digit number) followed by the day (another two-digit number) and then replace it with the third string found by the search (the day) followed by the second string (the month) followed by the first string (the year).

Regular expressions provide a way to reference parts of the search string in the replacement string using back references. To use back references, the portion of the search string to be referenced must first be enclosed in parentheses. Then the parenthesized part of the search string may be back referenced in the replacement string by inserting a dollar sign ($) character followed by an index number into the replacement string.

The following rename command uses back references to accomplish my first task of reordering the components of the dates and also inserts hyphens between the components:

rename 's/([0-9]{4})([0-9]{2})([0-9]{2})/$3-$2-$1/' *

Figure 3 illustrates which parts of the search expression are referenced by each back reference. The arrows in the figure point to the referenced parenthesized regions of the search expression.

Figure 3: A rename command that uses back references to rearrange the parts of a date string. The annotations illustrate each parenthesized region that is referenced by each back reference in the replacement expression.