Say you have a bunch of files like this:

file-01.jpg

file-02.jpg

...............

What if you want to mass rename them?

the rename tool can work just like sed

For Debian based distros:

Note "file" is what we search for and "newname" is what we replace it with, so substitute according to your requirements.

rename s/file/newname/ name-file-*.jpg

For RHEL Centos:

rename file newname file-*
 

Alternative way to batch rename files in Linux with bash using ls, sed and mv

for file in `ls -1`; do
newname=`echo $file|sed s/originalname/newname/g`
mv $file $newname
done

Just change "originalname" and "newname" in sed to match what you need.

The above doesn't work on spaces you'll need to use this code instead:

Based on this solution for not treating spaces as a new line or new variable in bash

For example the below code will replace all spaces with _

IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")


for file in `ls -1`; do newname=`echo $file|sed s/" "/"_"/g`;  mv $file $newname;  done

Another example

Say if you have some filenames that have illegal samba characters and want to remove them.

In this example it is times with colons eg "14:30:32"

Sed searches for ":" and replaces with "" (nothing) but we could replace with _ - or whatever else.

for file in `ls -1`; do
newname=`echo $file|sed s/://g`
mv $file $newname
echo $newname
done
 

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