Rename multiple files in Unix

Question

There are multiple files in a directory that begin with prefix fgh, for example:

fghfilea
fghfileb
fghfilec

I want to rename all of them to begin with prefix jkl. Is there a single command to do that instead of renaming each file individually?

Answer 1

There are several ways, but using rename will probably be the easiest.

Using one version of rename:

rename 's/^fgh/jkl/' fgh*

Using another version of rename (same as Judy2K's answer):

rename fgh jkl fgh*

You should check your platform's man page to see which of the above applies.

Answer 2

rename fgh jkl fgh*

Answer 3

This is how sed and mv can be used together to do what Stephan202 is thinking?

for f in fgh*; do mv $f $(echo $f | sed 's/^fgh/jkl/g'); done

Answer 4

rename might not be in every system. so if you don't have it, use the shell this example in bash shell

for f in fgh*; do mv "$f" "${f/fgh/xxx}";done

Answer 5

Good Article on

Renaming multiple files at once