Renaming files using regular expressions - Linux

Question

I have three files named

file1.txt
file2.txt
file3.txt

I am trying to rename them to

mynewfile-1.txt
mynewfile-2.txt
mynewfile-3.txt

How would I go about this using regular expressions?

Answer 1

Like this :

rename -n 's/^file/mynewfile-/' ./*.txt

or from comments :

rename -n 's/^file(\d+)/mynewfile-${1}-test/' ./*.txt
                   ___            ____
                    ^               ^
              capturing group       |
                               captured group

Drop -n switch when the output looks good to rename for real.

There are other tools with the same name which may or may not be able to do this, so be careful.

The rename command that is part of the util-linux package, won't.

If you run the following command (GNU)

$ rename

and you see perlexpr, then this seems to be the right tool.

If not, to make it the default (usually already the case) on Debian and derivative like Ubuntu :

$ sudo apt install rename
$ sudo update-alternatives --set rename /usr/bin/file-rename

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For archlinux:

pacman -S perl-rename

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For RedHat-family distros:

yum install prename

The 'prename' package is in the EPEL repository.

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For Gentoo:

emerge dev-perl/rename

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For *BSD:

pkg install p5-File-Rename

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For Mac users:

brew install rename

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If you don't have this command with another distro, search your package manager to install it or do it manually

Or you can use perl CPAN:

cpan -i File::Rename

Old standalone version can be found here

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man rename

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_{^{This tool was originally written by Larry Wall, the Perl's dad.}}