Renaming Files with PowerShell

Question

I need to rename a bunch of files at once in Windows PowerShell. I read the HTG article here and it helped a little.

My problem is that It will only rename files in the top of the directory, nothing deeper. For example: There is FOLDER A and inside FOLDERA is a document and FOLDER B. Inside FOLDER B is another document. Both folders and both documents need to be renamed. The way it is working now is that FOLDER A, the document in FOLDER A, and FOLDER B are being renamed, but not the document inside FOLDER B.

My current code is:

Dir | Rename-Item –NewName { $_.name –replace “ “,”_” }

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

You need to specify the -Recurse parameter on Dir to get it to recurse e.g.:

Dir -recurse | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.Name -replace ' ','_'}

BTW this may run into a problem because you're renaming the folder (FOLDERB) that contains the document first but the item being piped that corresponds to the file in FOLDERB still has the old name. In this case, you want to rename from the bottom up. One very crude but effective (I think) way to do this is to sort the file items on their path length descending e.g.:

Dir -recurse | Sort {$_.FullName.Length} -Desc | Rename-Item {$_.Name -replace ' ','_'}