Re: [Help-bash] how to bulk rename files

[Steven W. Orr]

On 4/11/2012 4:44 PM, address@hidden wrote:
> I have many files, 2.5 million, that I have to make available to Windows folks
> They demand that the files have a extension added
> Is there an efficient method of bulk renaming files
>
> Richard

I know this is probably inappropriate, but my fave is in perl.


#!/usr/bin/perl
$op = shift;
for (@ARGV) {
    $was = $_;
    eval $op;
    die $@ if $@;
    rename($was,$_) unless $was eq $_;
}

This allows you to do things like

rename 's/$/.sav' *
or
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rename 's/$/.sav/'

but you can also do cool things like

rename 'tr/A-Z/a-z' *
to cause all filenames to be lowercase

The corresponding big brother to this is replace_str

#! /usr/bin/perl -i.old
$from_text = shift ;
$to_text = shift ;
while( <> ) {
        s/$from_text/$to_text/g ;
        print ;
}

I promise never to inflict this on a bash list again. :-)

--
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individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
steveo at syslang.net