How to rename with prefix/suffix ?

Question

How do I do mv original.filename new.original.filename without retyping the original filename?

I would imagine being able to do something like mv -p=new. original.filename or perhaps mv original.filename new.~ or whatever - but I can't see anything like this after looking at man mv / info mv pages.

Of course, I could write a shell script to do this, but isn't there an existing command/flag for it?

Answer 1

Do you want to apply it to a whole directory? In that case, you can try

mv * new.*

Answer 2

If it's open to a modification, you could use a suffix instead of a prefix. Then you could use tab-completion to get the original filename and add the suffix.

Otherwise, no this isn't something that is supported by the mv command. A simple shell script could cope though.

Answer 3

I vote for the tab completion.

And in case others show up ... KSH uses ESC \ for the same thing.

AIX does not have rename.

Answer 4

You could use the rename(1) command:

rename 's/(.*)$/new.$1/' original.filename

Edit: If rename isn't available and you have to rename more than one file, shell scripting can really be short and simple for this. For example, to rename all .jpg to prefix*.jpg in the current directory:

for filename in *.jpg; do mv "$filename" "prefix_$filename"; done;

Answer 5

In Bash and zsh you can do this with Brace Expansion. This simply expands a list of items in braces. For example:

# echo {vanilla,chocolate,strawberry}-ice-cream
vanilla-ice-cream chocolate-ice-cream strawberry-ice-cream

So you can do your rename as follows:

mv {,new.}original.filename

as this expands to:

mv original.filename new.original.filename

Answer 6

I've seen people mention a rename command, but it is not routinely available on Unix systems (as opposed to Linux systems, say, or Cygwin - on both of which, rename is an executable rather than a script). That version of rename has a fairly limited functionality:

rename from to file ...

It replaces the from part of the file names with the to, and the example given in the man page is:

rename foo foo0 foo? foo??

This renames foo1 to foo01, and foo10 to foo010, etc.

I use a Perl script called rename, which I originally dug out from the first edition Camel book, circa 1992, and then extended, to rename files.

#!/bin/perl -w
#
# @(#)$Id: rename.pl,v 1.7 2008/02/16 07:53:08 jleffler Exp $
#
# Rename files using a Perl substitute or transliterate command

use strict;
use Getopt::Std;

my(%opts);
my($usage) = "Usage: $0 [-fnxV] perlexpr [filenames]\n";
my($force) = 0;
my($noexc) = 0;
my($trace) = 0;

die $usage unless getopts('fnxV', \%opts);

if ($opts{V})
{
    printf "%s\n", q'RENAME Version $Revision: 1.7 $ ($Date: 2008/02/16 07:53:08 $)';
    exit 0;
}
$force = 1 if ($opts{f});
$noexc = 1 if ($opts{n});
$trace = 1 if ($opts{x});

my($op) = shift;
die $usage unless defined $op;

if (!@ARGV) {
    @ARGV = <STDIN>;
    chop(@ARGV);
}

for (@ARGV)
{
    if (-e $_ || -l $_)
    {
        my($was) = $_;
        eval $op;
        die $@ if $@;
        next if ($was eq $_);
        if ($force == 0 && -f $_)
        {
            print STDERR "rename failed: $was - $_ exists\n";
        }
        else
        {
            print "+ $was --> $_\n" if $trace;
            print STDERR "rename failed: $was - $!\n"
                unless ($noexc || rename($was, $_));
        }
    }
    else
    {
        print STDERR "$_ - $!\n";
    }
}

This allows you to write any Perl substitute or transliterate command to map file names. In the specific example requested, you'd use:

rename 's/^/new./' original.filename