How to Batch Rename Files in a macOS Terminal

Question

I have a folder with a series of files named   prefix 1234 567 png prefix abcd efg png   I d like to batch remove one underscore and the middle content so the output would be   prefix 567 png prefix efg png   Relevant but not completely explanatory    How can I batch rename files using the Terminal  Regex to batch rename files in OS X Terminal

User · Answer

You could use sed   ls     sed -e  p s        g    xargs -n2 mv   result   prefix 567 png prefix efg png    to do a dry-run first  replace mv at the end with echo  Explanation    e  optional for only 1 sed command   p  to print the input to sed  in this case it will be the original file name before any renaming    is a replacement of   character to make sed more readable  That is  instead of using sed s search replace g  use s search replace g       the underscore is an escape character to refer to the actual     character zero or more times  as opposed to ANY character in regex  -n2   indicates that there are 2 outputs that need to be passed on to mv as parameters  for each input from ls  this sed command will generate 2 output  which will then supplied to mv

User · Answer

Using mmv  mmv           1  3    png

User · Answer

I had a batch of files that looked like this  be90-01 png and needed to change the dash to underscore  I used this  which worked well   for f in    do mv   f    echo  f   tr  -         done

User · Answer

To rename files  you can use the rename utility   brew install rename  For example  to change a search string in all filenames in current directory   rename -nvs searchword replaceword     Remove the  n  parameter to apply the changes   More info  man rename

User · Answer

try this  for i in   png   do mv   i     i remove me  png  png     done   Here is another way   for file in Name  png  do mv   file   01  file   done

User · Answer

you can install rename command by using brew  just do brew install rename and use it

User · Answer

In your specific case you can use the following bash command  bash is the default shell on macOS    for f in   png  do echo mv   f     f          done   Note  If there s a chance that your filenames start with -  place --  before them 1   mv --   f     f          Note  echo is prepended to mv so as to perform a dry run  Remove it to perform actual renaming   You can run it from the command line or use it in a script       f         is an application of bash parameter expansion  the  first  substring matching pattern     is replaced with literal    effectively cutting the middle token from the name  Note that     is a pattern  a wildcard expression  as also used for globbing   not a regular expression  to learn about patterns  run man bash and search for Pattern Matching       If you find yourself batch-renaming files frequently  consider installing a specialized tool such as the Perl-based rename utility  On macOS you can install it using popular package manager Homebrew as follows   brew install rename   Here s the equivalent of the command at the top using rename   rename -n -e  s             png   Again  this command performs a dry run  remove -n to perform actual renaming    Similar to the bash solution  s          performs text substitution  but - unlike in bash - true regular expressions are used       1  The purpose of special argument --  which is supported by most utilities  is to signal that subsequent arguments should be treated as operands  values   even if they look like options due to starting with -  as Jacob C  notes

[bash] How to Batch Rename Files in a macOS Terminal?

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