Rename Multiple Files in Linux

From time to time we need to rename a bunch of files according to some pattern. One simple example that comes to mind is that recently I noticed that some articles in my blog had a .md extension and some had a .markdown extension. I don’t like inconsistencies, so I wanted them all to have a .md extension. Bellow I’ll cover several ways to do this on Linux¹. All the examples will assume you’re renaming files in the same folder, but it’s typically trivial to extend them to a directory tree by combining a command with find -exec or extended globbing (e.g. **/*.markdown). So, here we go.

One simple option is to use the rename utility from the util-linux package:

$ rename markdown md *.markdown

Basically you’re doing a text substitution in the list of files passed to the command. The problem with this is that it won’t work properly in cases like markdown.markdown. Fortunately, Debian and Debian-derived distributions (e.g. Ubuntu) ship a more powerful version of this command, that’s written in Perl, and supports regular expressions.

$ sudo apt install rename
$ rename 's/\.markdown$/.md/' *.markdown

The regular expression allows us to be specific about the match and prevents the problem listed above. By the way, generally it’s a good idea to first preview any changes that the command might perform with the -n option:

$ rename -n 's/\.markdown$/.md/' *.markdown
rename(2008-05-05-first-post.markdown, 2008-05-05-first-post.md)
rename(2008-06-16-das-keyboard.markdown, 2008-06-16-das-keyboard.md)
rename(2008-06-19-emacs-rails.markdown, 2008-06-19-emacs-rails.md)
rename(2008-07-27-zsh-prompt.markdown, 2008-07-27-zsh-prompt.md)
rename(2008-09-29-singleton-java-ruby.markdown, 2008-09-29-singleton-java-ruby.md)
rename(2009-05-04-switch-string-idiom-java.markdown, 2009-05-04-switch-string-idiom-java.md)

Super handy!

If you don’t want to use an external command you can leverage some shell features instead:

$ for f in *.markdown; do
    mv -- "$f" "${f%.markdown}.md"
done

This relies on some relatively advanced substitution features of Bash and Zsh, that are beyond the scope of today’s article, but it gets the job done. Interestingly enough, Zsh provides a much simpler and way more powerful way to tackle mass rename, via the zmv utility it bundles:

$ zmv '(*).markdown' '$1.md'

While zmv doesn’t use regular expressions, its matching and substitution functionality should cover pretty much everything you decide to throw at it. Note that zmv is usually not enabled by default and you might have to load it manually before using it:

$ autoload -Uz zmv

Notice also that in the first argument of zmv you’ve specifying both the search pattern for files and substitution groups you can use in the second argument. You can do way more complex renamings with zmv:

# rename dir1/file.txt, dir2/file.txt, etc to file-1.txt, file-2.txt, etc
$ zmv zmv 'dir(*)/file.txt' 'file-${1}.txt'

Obviously sky is the limit here, although this applies to the Perl version of the rename command as well. One cool thing about zmv is that you just like with rename you can preview the changes it’s going to do with the -n option.

$ zmv -n '(*).markdown' '$1.md'

This will help you to quickly find the right pattern for the mass rename you’re trying to perform.

That’s all I have for you today. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible, but I still hope you learned something new and useful. Keep hacking!

1. Most of those suggestions should also work on other Unix-like operating systems like macOS, *BSD, etc. ↩