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macosunixfile-rename

Multiple file rename unix

I am new to unix (using the Mac OS X terminal) and am trying to rename certain files by adding some text in the middle of the filename. For all files in the folder ./temp I would like to replace filenames beginning dr_ic0004 with dr_ic0004_DMN.

For example dr_0004_tstat1.txt and dr_0004_tstat2.txt with dr_0004_DMN_tstat1.txt and dr_0004_DMN_tstat2.txt respectively.

Solution

  • Suppose you had dr_ic0004foo, dr_ic0004bar and dr_ic0004baz. To see them all, you'd do:

    ls dr_ic0004*

    To isolate the variable parts (foo, bar and baz) you could run that list through sed:

    ls dr_ic0004*|sed 's/^dr_ic0004//'

    To rename a single file you would use mv:

    mv dr_ic0004foo dr_ic0004_DMNfoo

    And to iterate over a list, you could use a for loop:

    for x in foo bar baz; do echo $x ; done

    Put them all together and you get:

    for x in `ls dr_ic0004*|sed 's/^dr_ic0004//'`; do mv dr_ic0004$x dr_ic0004_DMN$x; done