Unix Bash rename files using a regex

Question

I would like to rename all files from a folder using a regex(add a name to the end of name) and move to another folder.

It my opinion, it should be looking like this:

mv -v ./images/*.png ./test/*test.png, but it is not working.

Can anyone suggest me a solution?

Answer 1

I also like the rename command that John T posted, but it's not available on all systems. This should work everywhere:

for i in *.png; do mv -v $i `basename $i .png`.test.png; done

Answer 2

There's a handy perl file-renaming script that gets installed with the main Perl package on Debian-based systems (including Ubuntu). It's usually named rename, but sometimes is called prename (Perl rename). Use like this:

rename expr file1 file2 file3

The command uses Perl to evaluate expr for each file argument, and it renames each file to the output of the expr evalutation. So, for simple regex replacements like your example:

rename 's(images/(.*)\.png$)(test/$1.test.png)' ./images/*

# here's the expression:
# s()()   -- just like s/// (but i don't need to escape the / in the filename)
#   match regex:  images/(.*)\.png$     -- match filenames of the form images/*.png
#   replace:      test/$1.test.png     -- turn them into test/*.test.png

If files don't match the expression (for example, non-PNG files), the substitution won't do anything and their filenames won't be changed.

Answer 3

You can use rename which accepts regular expressions or this basic 3 argument syntax:

rename .png .test.png *.png

• The first argument is what to replace in the filename
• The second argument is what to replace it with
• The third argument is what files to perform the operation on, in this case, all pngs.