Let me show two practical scenarios where this command will save you a lot of time. Now you must be wondering how to rename files with the rename command. If you are a sudo user in Ubuntu or Debian, you can use this command to install rename: sudo apt install rename -s : Do not rename the symlink but its targetĭo note that rename command is not a standard utility that are pre-installed on the Linux distributions like mv or cp command.Show the files that would be renamed but don’t rename the files. This 'rename command' has the following options: This is the syntax rename command follows: rename perlexpr The rename command only works on the filename, not the file itself. There is a command line utility called rename that allows you to rename all the files that match a certain pattern in Perl regex form. You can use the find exec command option with the mv command to automate this process.īut let me tell you an even simpler way of renaming files based on regex pattern. Using mv command one by one would take plenty of time and should surely be avoided. That’s the standard way after all.īut what about the situation where you have to rename several files. The same mv command is used for renaming directories as well. You simply use it in the format: mv old_file_name new_file_name

I believe you already know how to rename files in Linux with mv command.

Bash rename multiple files