How to Rename Similar Files at the Command Prompt Using Sed

Posted on by russell

Using a simple “script” at the command line, you can rename a bunch of similar filenames with ease. Say you’ve got something like: foo-001, foo-002 and foo-003, but you want them to be bar-001, bar-002 and bar-003. The script will look like :
$ for i in `ls -1 foo*`; do mv $i `echo $i |sed -e 's/foo/bar/'`; done
You can test your code without making changes by removing the ‘mv’ command and just echoing the results to stdout like so :
$ for i in `ls -1 foo*'; do echo $i |sed -e 's/foo/bar/'; done
With the latter command, you can examine the results to see if that’s actually what you want ‘mv’ to rename the files to.