how to rename a file in linux
Published on Aug. 22, 2023, 12:16 p.m.
To rename a file in Linux, you can use the mv
command (short for move), which can be used to move or rename files and directories. Here’s the basic syntax of the mv
command to rename a file:
mv current_file_name new_file_name
For example, if you want to rename a file named “myfile.txt” to “newfile.txt”, you can use the following command:
mv myfile.txt newfile.txt
If the file is located in a different directory, you need to specify the full path or the relative path to the file. For example, to rename a file named “myfile.txt” located in the directory /home/user/documents
to “newfile.txt”, you can use the following command:
mv /home/user/documents/myfile.txt /home/user/documents/newfile.txt
If you want to rename multiple files at once, you can use wildcards in the mv
command. For example, to rename all files with a .txt extension in the current directory to have the .bak extension, you can use the following command:
mv *.txt *.bak
This will rename all files with a .txt extension to have a .bak extension.
I hope that helps! Let me know if you have any further questions.
To rename multiple files in Linux
To rename multiple files in Linux, you can use the rename
command, which allows you to rename files based on a pattern or regular expression. The rename
command is particularly useful when you want to rename a large number of files at once.
Here’s the basic syntax of the rename
command:
rename 's/old_pattern/new_pattern/' file_pattern
In the above command, old_pattern
is the old pattern that you want to replace, new_pattern
is the new pattern that you want to replace the old pattern with, and file_pattern
is the pattern of the filenames you want to rename.
For example, to replace all occurrences of “file” with “document” in all files that match the pattern “*.txt”, you can use the following command:
rename 's/file/document/' *.txt
This will rename all files in the current directory with the “.txt” extension that contain “file” in the filename to have “document” in their filename.
Note that the rename
command can vary slightly between different Linux distributions. Additionally, you may need to install it separately on some distributions.