How to quickly rename a bunch of files in the folder

Question

I have a bunch of files that are named 'something_12345.doc' (any 5-digit number, not necessarily 12345). I need to rename them all to just 'something.doc'. This is a Unix filesystem, and I suspect there's a way to do this with just one command... Can any Unix regular expressions guru help?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Yes, rename takes perl style regular expressions. Do a man rename.

Answer 2

rename 's/_[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]//' *.doc

Answer 3

@OP, the shell has already expanding your pattern for you, there in your mv statement, you don't have to specify the pattern for 5 digits again.

for file in *_[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].doc
do
  echo mv "$file" "${file%_*}.doc"
done

Answer 4

This question was asked a lot of times on SO:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1956144/bash-script-to-rename-all-files-in-a-directory
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2051204/bash-linux-massive-folder-rename
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/417916/how-to-do-a-mass-rename
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7137/replacing-one-string-in-a-bunch-of-file-names-with-another

My personal preference goes to mmv. But see "Mass Rename/copy/link Tools".