I recently had to rename 350+ files. So I decided it was time that I learned
how to rename files using bash scripting. There are multiple parts to this.
First you need to create and itterate through a list of files. Then you
need to send this into the mv command where you can rename the file using
special operations.
Here is an example of a script that removes all the .tabular extensions.
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for f in *;
do mv $f ${f%.tabular};
done
Notice the % and the f. This is telling the script to remove the string
.tabular from the back f wich is your filename.
If you want something removed from the front of your file you should use #.
You may want to change the caseing of your file names. In that case, you can
just do:
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for f in *;
do mv $f `echo $f | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`;
done
Both of these scripts scans for all the files indicates by the *. If you
would like a specific file you can insert *.txt or *.tabular.
In addition, you can use the pipe command to get more complex. If you wanted to
remove the second occurrence of _ from every file you can just pipe in sed
as so:
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for f in tss*;
do test ${f%.*} = $f && mv $f `echo $f | sed 's/_/./2'`;
done