How to rename files with bash

Posted: August 22, 2006/Under: Software Development/By: Michael Stepanov

Recently I uploaded a few photos to the my site and I did a mistake in the name: Kirenia intead of Kyrenia. There were ten files but I didn’t want to change their names one by one. Thanks to bash. It offers an easy and elegant way to fix this problem:
for FILE in `find|grep Kirenia`; do TARGET=$(echo $FILE | sed -e "s/Ki/Ky/"); mv $FILE $TARGET; done;
P. S. I alwas forget about structure bash operator for:
for VARIABLE in LIST; do SOME_OPERATIONS ...; done

2 responses to “How to rename files with bash”

Leonid Mamchenkov says:

August 22, 2006 at 15:17

There are even more elegant ways of doing this.

First, find command provides the -exec switch, which allows you to execute a command (or a list of commands) on each found match.

Second, there is a rename command, which would make your life much easier in this particular case.

Cheers! 🙂
Michael Stepanov says:

August 23, 2006 at 09:29

Thanks, there is a more than one way to do it 🙂

How to rename files with bash