rw-rw-r- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6538895 Oct 10 12:10 LIFESTYLE.HTML rw-rw-r- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6188895 Oct 10 12:10 HEALTH.HTML rw-rw-r- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 588895 Oct 10 12:10 ENTERTAINMENT.HTML rw-rw-r- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6888896 Oct 10 12:10 CRICKET.HTML Once you’ve executed the above command, you can check the changes by doing “ ls -l“. Just, use the following command with perl expression. For example, I want to covert all these following files from lower to upper case. To batch rename all files with lower case names to upper case. Convert all Lowercase to Uppercase and Vise-Versa So, if you want to get the details of rename command (like we did using “ -n” option), here we use “ -v” option to print the complete details of all the changes done by rename command successfully. We saw that the rename command didn’t displayed any information of changes it does. Note: The above command output only displays changes, but in real the changes are not done, unless you run the command without “ -n” switch. :~$ rename -n 's/\.php$/\.html/' *.phpĮntertainment.php renamed as entertainment.html Here, is the example of the command below.
The “ -n” parameter will tell you exactly what changes would take place, but the changes are not done for real. While doing critical or major renaming tasks, you can always check the changes by running rename command with “ -n” argument. Check Changes Before Running Rename Command Now you can see above that all the html files are renamed to php. rw-rw-r- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 978137 Oct 10 12:11 sports.php rw-rw-r- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 938937 Oct 10 12:11 photos.php rw-rw-r- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 938895 Oct 10 12:10 news.php rw-rw-r- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6538895 Oct 10 12:10 lifestyle.php rw-rw-r- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 588895 Oct 10 12:10 entertainment.php rw-rw-r- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6888896 Oct 10 12:10 cricket.php php” extension, doing ls -l on the prompt. Let’s verify whether all files are renamed to “. Second argument tells the rename command to substitute all the files with *.php.First argument is a perl expression that substitute.Note: In the above command we’ve used two arguments. You can use the following “ rename” command with perl expression as shown below. Now, you want to change the extension of all these files from “. rw-rw-r- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 978137 Oct 10 12:11 sports.html rw-rw-r- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 938937 Oct 10 12:11 photos.html
rw-rw-r- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 938895 Oct 10 12:10 news.html rw-rw-r- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6538895 Oct 10 12:10 lifestyle.html rw-rw-r- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6188895 Oct 10 12:10 health.html rw-rw-r- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 588895 Oct 10 12:10 entertainment.html rw-rw-r- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6888896 Oct 10 12:10 cricket.html For example, first do a “ ls -l” to check the list of files with “. html” extension and you want to rename all “. -n: Show what files would have been renamed.įor better understanding of this utility, we’ve discussed few practical examples of this command in the article.-v: Print names of files successfully renamed.The rename command comes with few optional arguments along with mandatory perl expression that guides rename command to do actual work. usr/bin/rename The Basic Syntax of Rename Command rename 's/old-name/new-name/' files You can run “ which” command to find out the location of rename command. The “ rename” command is a part of Perl script and it resides under “ /usr/bin/” on many Linux distributions. The rename command is used to rename multiple or group of files, rename files to lowercase, rename files to uppercase and overwrite files using perl expressions. Linux comes with a very powerful built-in tool called rename. However, renaming multiple or group of files quickly makes it very difficult task in a terminal. We often use “ mv” command to rename a single file in Linux.