Zaira Hira

Renaming files is a very common operation whether you are using the command line or the GUI.

Compared to the GUI (or Graphical User Interface), the CLI is especially powerful. This is in part because you can rename files in bulk or even schedule the scripts to rename files at a certain point in time.

In this tutorial, you will see how you can rename files in the Linux command line using the built-in mv command.

How to Use the Linux mv Command

You can use the built-in Linux command mv to rename files.

The mv command follows this syntax:

mv [options] source_file destination_file

Here are some of the options that can come in handy with the mv command:

• -v , --verbose: Explains what is being done.
• -i, --interactive: Prompts before renaming the file.

Let's say you want to rename index.html to web_page.html. You use the mv command as follows:

zaira@Zaira:~/rename-files$ mv index.html web_page.html

Let's list the files and see if the file has been renamed:

zaira@Zaira:~/rename-files$ ls
web_page.html

How to Name Files in Bulk Using mv

Let's discuss a script where you can rename files in a bulk using a loop and the mv command.

Here we have a list of files with the extension .js.

zaira@Zaira:~/rename-files$ ls -lrt
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 zaira zaira 0 Sep 30 00:24 index.js
-rw-r--r-- 1 zaira zaira 0 Sep 30 00:24 config.js
-rw-r--r-- 1 zaira zaira 0 Sep 30 00:24 blog.js

Next, you want to convert them to .html.

You can use the command below to rename all the files in the folder:

for f in *.js; do mv -- "$f" "${f%.js}.html"; done

Let's break down this long string to see what's happening under the hood:

• The first part [for f in *.js] tells the for loop to process each “.js” file in the directory.
• The next part [do mv -- "$f" "${f%.js}.html] specifies what the processing will do. It is using mv to rename each file. The new file is going to be named with the original file’s name excluding the .js part. A new extension of .html will be appended instead.
• The last part [done] simply ends the loop once all the files have been processed.

zaira@Zaira:~/rename-files$ ls -lrt
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 zaira zaira 0 Sep 30 00:24 index.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 zaira zaira 0 Sep 30 00:24 config.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 zaira zaira 0 Sep 30 00:24 blog.html

Conclusion

As you can see, renaming files is quite easy using the CLI. It can be really powerful when deployed in a script.

What’s your favorite thing you learned here? Let me know on Twitter!

You can read my other posts here.

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Zaira Hira

I am a DevOps Consultant and writer at FreeCodeCamp. I aim to provide easy and to-the-point content for Techies!

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