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.

Tags: