[bash] How do I rename the extension for a bunch of files?

In a directory, I have a bunch of *.html files. I'd like to rename them all to *.txt

How can I do that? I use the bash shell.

This question explicitly mentions Bash, but if you happen to have ZSH available it is pretty simple:

zmv '(*).*' '$1.txt'

If you get zsh: command not found: zmv then simply run:

autoload -U zmv

And then try again.

Thanks to this original article for the tip about zmv.

Here is a solution, using AWK. Make sure the files are present in the working directory. Else, cd to the directory where the html files are located and then execute the below command:

for i in $(ls | grep .html); do j=$(echo $i | grep -oh "^\w*." | awk '{print $1"txt"}'); mv $i $j; done

Nice & simple!

find . -iname *.html  -exec mv {} "$(basename {} .html).text"  \;

Here is what i used to rename .edge files to .blade.php

for file in *.edge; do     mv "$file" "$(basename "$file" .edge).blade.php"; done

Works like charm.

This is a good way to modify multiple extensions at once:

for fname in *.{mp4,avi}
do
   mv -v "$fname" "${fname%.???}.mkv"
done

Note: be careful at the extension size to be the same (the ???)

Similarly to what was suggested before, this is how I did it:

find . -name '*OldText*' -exec sh -c 'mv "$0" "${0/OldText/NewText}"' {} \;

I first validated with

find . -name '*OldText*' -exec sh -c 'echo mv "$0" "${0/OldText/NewText}"' {} \;

For Ubuntu Users :

rename 's/\.html$/\.txt/' *.html

A bit late to the party. You could do it with xargs:

ls *.html | xargs -I {} sh -c 'mv $1 `basename $1 .html`.txt' - {}

Or if all your files are in some folder

ls folder/*.html | xargs -I {} sh -c 'mv $1 folder/`basename $1 .html`.txt' - {}

If using bash, there's no need for external commands like sed, basename, rename, expr, etc.

for file in *.html
do
  mv "$file" "${file%.html}.txt"
done

Here is an example of the rename command:

rename -n ’s/\.htm$/\.html/’ *.htm

The -n means that it's a test run and will not actually change any files. It will show you a list of files that would be renamed if you removed the -n. In the case above, it will convert all files in the current directory from a file extension of .htm to .html.

If the output of the above test run looked ok then you could run the final version:

rename -v ’s/\.htm$/\.html/’ *.htm

The -v is optional, but it's a good idea to include it because it is the only record you will have of changes that were made by the rename command as shown in the sample output below:

$ rename -v 's/\.htm$/\.html/' *.htm
3.htm renamed as 3.html
4.htm renamed as 4.html
5.htm renamed as 5.html

The tricky part in the middle is a Perl substitution with regular expressions, highlighted below:

rename -v ’s/\.htm$/\.html/’ *.htm

The command mmv seems to do this task very efficiently on a huge number of files (tens of thousands in a second). For example, to rename all .xml files to .html files, use this:

mmv ";*.xml" "#1#2.html"

the ; will match the path, the * will match the filename, and these are referred to as #1 and #2 in the replacement name.

Answers based on exec or pipes were either too slow or failed on a very large number of files.

On a Mac...

1. Install rename if you haven't: brew install rename
2. rename -S .html .txt *.html

Try this

rename .html .txt *.html 

usage:

rename [find] [replace_with] [criteria]

After someone else's website crawl, I ended up with thousands of files missing the .html extension, across a wide tree of subdirectories.

To rename them all in one shot, except the files already having a .html extension (most of them had none at all), this worked for me:

cd wwwroot
find . -xtype f \! -iname *.html   -exec mv -iv "{}"  "{}.html"  \;  # batch rename files to append .html suffix IF MISSING

In the OP's case I might modify that slightly, to only rename *.txt files, like so:

find . -xtype f  -iname *.txt   -exec filename="{}"  mv -iv ${filename%.*}.{txt,html}  \; 

Broken down (hammertime!):

-iname *.txt
- Means consider ONLY files already ending in .txt

mv -iv "{}.{txt,html}" - When find passes a {} as the filename, ${filename%.*} extracts its basename without any extension to form the parameters to mv. bash takes the {txt,html} to rewrite it as two parameters so the final command runs as: mv -iv "filename.txt" "filename.html"

Fix needed though: dealing with spaces in filenames

I wrote this code in my .bashrc

alias find-ext='read -p "Path (dot for current): " p_path; read -p "Ext (unpunctured): " p_ext1; find $p_path -type f -name "*."$p_ext1'
alias rename-ext='read -p "Path (dot for current): " p_path; read -p "Ext (unpunctured): " p_ext1; read -p "Change by ext. (unpunctured): " p_ext2; echo -en "\nFound files:\n"; find $p_path -type f -name "*.$p_ext1"; find $p_path -type f -name "*.$p_ext1" -exec sh -c '\''mv "$1" "${1%.'\''$p_ext1'\''}.'\''$p_ext2'\''" '\'' _ {} \;; echo -en "\nChanged Files:\n"; find $p_path -type f -name "*.$p_ext2";'

In a folder like "/home/<user>/example-files" having this structure:

• /home/<user>/example-files:
  • file1.txt
  • file2.txt
  • file3.pdf
  • file4.csv

The commands would behave like this:

~$ find-text
Path (dot for current): example-files/
Ext (unpunctured): txt

example-files/file1.txt
example-files/file2.txt


~$ rename-text
Path (dot for current): ./example-files
Ext (unpunctured): txt
Change by ext. (unpunctured): mp3

Found files:
./example-files/file1.txt
./example-files/file1.txt

Changed Files:
./example-files/file1.mp3
./example-files/file1.mp3
~$

rename 's/\.html$/\.txt/' *.html

does exactly what you want.

You can also make a function in Bash, add it to .bashrc or something and then use it wherever you want.

change-ext() {
    for file in *.$1; do mv "$file" "$(basename "$file" .$1).$2"; done
}

Usage:

change-ext css scss

Source of code in function: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1224786/6732111

One line, no loops:

ls -1 | xargs -L 1 -I {} bash -c 'mv $1 "${1%.*}.txt"' _ {}

Example:

$ ls
60acbc4d-3a75-4090-85ad-b7d027df8145.json  ac8453e2-0d82-4d43-b80e-205edb754700.json
$ ls -1 | xargs -L 1 -I {} bash -c 'mv $1 "${1%.*}.txt"' _ {}
$ ls
60acbc4d-3a75-4090-85ad-b7d027df8145.txt  ac8453e2-0d82-4d43-b80e-205edb754700.txt

If you prefer PERL, there is a short PERL script (originally written by Larry Wall, the creator of PERL) that will do exactly what you want here: tips.webdesign10.com/files/rename.pl.txt.

For your example the following should do the trick:

rename.pl 's/html/txt/' *.html

Rename file extensions for all files under current directory and sub directories without any other packages (only use shell script):

1. Create a shell script rename.sh under current directory with the following code:

   #!/bin/bash
   
   for file in $(find . -name "*$1"); do
     mv "$file" "${file%$1}$2"
   done
   

2. Run it by ./rename.sh .old .new.

   Eg. ./rename.sh .html .txt

Unfortunately it's not trivial to do portably. You probably need a bit of expr magic.

for file in *.html; do echo mv -- "$file" "$(expr "$file" : '\(.*\)\.html').txt"; done

Remove the echo once you're happy it does what you want.

Edit: basename is probably a little more readable for this particular case, although expr is more flexible in general.

This worked for me on OSX from .txt to .txt_bak

find . -name '*.txt' -exec sh -c 'mv "$0" "${0%.txt}.txt_bak"' {} \;

You want to use rename :

rename -S .html .txt *.html

This does exactly what you want - it will change the extension from .html to .txt for all files matching *.html.

Note: Greg Hewgill correctly points out this is not a bash builtin; and is a seperate Linux command. If you just need something on Linux this should work fine; if you need something more cross-platform then take a look at one of the other answers.

This is the slickest solution I've found that works on OSX and Linux, and it works nicely with git too!

find . -name "*.js" -exec bash -c 'mv "$1" "${1%.js}".tsx' - '{}' \;

and with git:

find . -name "*.js" -exec bash -c 'git mv "$1" "${1%.js}".tsx' - '{}' \;