Find and replace filename recursively in a directory

Question

I want to rename all the files in a folder which starts with 123_xxx.txt to xxx.txt.

For example, my directory has:

123_xxx         


        

Answer 1

Provided you don't have newlines in your filenames:

find -name '123_*.txt' | while IFS= read -r file; do mv "$file" "${file#123_}"; done

For a really safe way, provided your find supports the -print0 flag (GNU find does):

find -name '123_*.txt' -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do mv "$file" "${file#123_}"; done