Need help in renameing files in terminal

bookman761 · 12-20-2007, 04:44 PM

Hi,

I have a collection of mp3 files that I would like to rename. I want to simply add a prefis to my files such as;

hotel california.mp3 >>>>> eagles-hotel california.mp3

Do you knoe the rename command and its options to do this in the terminal?

Thanks,
FG

pwc101 · 12-20-2007, 04:49 PM

Code:

mv hotel\ california.mp3 eagles-hotel\ california.mp3

You need to escape the spaces with a backslash. Otherwise, you could do this:

Code:

mv "hotel california.mp3" "eagles-hotel california.mp3"

bookman761 · 12-20-2007, 04:51 PM

How do i do this to multiple files at once.

Do I simply do:

mv *.mp3 eagles-*.mp3

Thanks,

FG

lleb · 12-20-2007, 05:14 PM

there is a way, but i forget it has to do with building a string $ and changing things.

gilead · 12-20-2007, 05:18 PM

Do you have the rename command in your distro? From the man page:

Code:

rename  will  rename  the specified files by replacing the first 
occurrence of from in their name by to.

For example, given the files foo1, ..., foo9, foo10, ..., foo278, the commands

              rename foo foo0 foo?
              rename foo foo0 foo??

will turn them into foo001, ..., foo009, foo010, ..., foo278.

And
              rename .htm .html *.htm

will fix the extension of your html files.

chrism01 · 12-20-2007, 05:24 PM

FYI, most Unix tools don't like spaces in filenames, so you have to either explicitly escape them or use quotes as mentioned above.
In short, don't put spaces in filenames if you can avoid it.

dasy2k1 · 12-20-2007, 08:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bookman761

How do i do this to multiple files at once.

Do I simply do:

mv *.mp3 eagles-*.mp3

Thanks,

FG

should work.

though the spaces may cause problems

gilead · 12-21-2007, 12:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dasy2k1

Code:

mv *.mp3 eagles-*.mp3

should work.

though the spaces may cause problems

No, that doesn't work here. The shell tried to expand each '*' before passing it to the mv command. The eagles-*.mp3 couldn't be expanded, was passed to mv as the destination directory and caused an error of:

Code:

mv: target `eagles-*.mp3' is not a directory

pwc101 · 12-21-2007, 05:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bookman761

How do i do this to multiple files at once.

Do I simply do:

mv *.mp3 eagles-*.mp3

Thanks,

FG

This should do it:

Code:

for i in *.mp3; do mv "$i" eagles-"$i"; done