I had a set of files that have a common naming scheme and I wantd to replace a word common to all the filenames with another word. Unix-style shell utilities make it easy to do this sort of batch rename operation by finding and replacing patterns in filenames. Windows users can gain access to these powerful programs by installing Cygwin. Rename file pattern windows batch. Ask Question Asked 7 years, 6 months ago. Active 7 years, 6 months ago. Viewed 7k times 8 2. I have some files looking like.
This was my first workable attempt at doing batch renaming:
Rename Files In Linux
The command works as follows:
ls -1 *foo*
lists all the files in the current directory withfoo
in the file name. It lists one filename per line.- The ouptut is piped to
awk '{print('mv '$1 ' ' $1)}'
command. This produces new output where each line ismv FILENAME FILENAME
, with FILENAME being the corresponding filename. - The output from the
awk
command is piped tosed 's/foo/bar/2'
, which replaces the second instance offoo
in a line withbar
. The second instance offoo
corresponds to the second FILENAME in themv FILENAME FILENAME
lines generated by the awk command. This creates output of the formmv FILENAME NEWFILENAME
, where the new filename is desired filename withfoo
replaced withbar
. - Finally, the entire output is saved to rename.txt for user review to ensure that the rename commands are being generated correctly. As with the main batch rename technique, you could pipe the output to
/bin/bash
but this is not recommended.
Multitouch 1 8 4 download free. This technique has some caveats. The first is that since it does not work with file names with spaces. The awk
command prints the first field $1
in each line of input, and the spaces in the file name causes the first word of the filename to be treated as the entire first field.
The second is that since sed
replaces the second instance of foo
in a line, it does not handle the case where the file name had multiple instances of foo
in the first place. For example, if you had a file named 'foofoo.jpg', then the corresponding command generated by the above code would be: Airserver 7 0 1 download free.
The second foo
is replaced with bar
Currency assistant 3 2 4 – convenient currency conversion. , which is not what you want. Thus, this technique does not work when there is more than one instance of the word you want to replace in the filename.
Windows Rename Files By Patterns
This was my first workable attempt at doing batch renaming:
The command works as follows:
ls -1 *foo*
lists all the files in the current directory withfoo
in the file name. It lists one filename per line.- The ouptut is piped to
awk '{print('mv '$1 ' ' $1)}'
command. This produces new output where each line ismv FILENAME FILENAME
, with FILENAME being the corresponding filename. - The output from the
awk
command is piped tosed 's/foo/bar/2'
, which replaces the second instance offoo
in a line withbar
. The second instance offoo
corresponds to the second FILENAME in themv FILENAME FILENAME
lines generated by the awk command. This creates output of the formmv FILENAME NEWFILENAME
, where the new filename is desired filename withfoo
replaced withbar
. - Finally, the entire output is saved to rename.txt for user review to ensure that the rename commands are being generated correctly. As with the main batch rename technique, you could pipe the output to
/bin/bash
but this is not recommended.
Rename Files Free
This technique has some caveats. The first is that since it does not work with file names with spaces. The awk
command prints the first field $1
in each line of input, and the spaces in the file name causes the first word of the filename to be treated as the entire first field.
The second is that since sed
replaces the second instance of foo
in a line, it does not handle the case where the file name had multiple instances of foo
in the first place. For example, if you had a file named 'foofoo.jpg', then the corresponding command generated by the above code would be:
The second foo
is replaced with bar
, which is not what you want. Thus, this technique does not work when there is more than one instance of the word you want to replace in the filename.