Rename multiple files based on pattern in Unix

Question

There are multiple files in a directory that begin with prefix fgh, for example:

fghfilea
fghfileb
fghfilec

I want to rename a

Answer 1

There are many ways to do it (not all of these will work on all unixy systems):

• ls | cut -c4- | xargs -I§ mv fgh§ jkl§

  The § may be replaced by anything you find convenient. You could do this with find -exec too but that behaves subtly different on many systems, so I usually avoid that

• for f in fgh*; do mv "$f" "${f/fgh/jkl}";done

  Crude but effective as they say

• rename 's/^fgh/jkl/' fgh*

  Real pretty, but rename is not present on BSD, which is the most common unix system afaik.

• rename fgh jkl fgh*

• ls | perl -ne 'chomp; next unless -e; $o = $_; s/fgh/jkl/; next if -e; rename $o, $_';

  If you insist on using Perl, but there is no rename on your system, you can use this monster.

Some of those are a bit convoluted and the list is far from complete, but you will find what you want here for pretty much all unix systems.