Rename – A Command Line Tool For Renaming Multiple Files in Linux

We often use “mv” command to rename a single file in Linux. However, renaming multiple or group of files quickly makes it very difficult task in a terminal.

Linux comes with a very powerful built-in tool called rename. The rename command is used to rename multiple or group of files, rename files to lowercase, rename files to uppercase and overwrite files using perl expressions.

Rename Multiple Files In Linux

The “rename” command is a part of Perl script and it resides under “/usr/bin/” on many Linux distributions. You can run “which” command to find out the location of rename command.

$ which rename
/usr/bin/rename
The Basic Syntax of Rename Command
rename 's/old-name/new-name/' files

The rename command comes with few optional arguments along with mandatory perl expression that guides rename command to do actual work.

rename [ -v ] [ -n ] [ -f ] perlexpr [ files ]
  1. -v: Print names of files successfully renamed.
  2. -n: Show what files would have been renamed.
  3. -f: Force overwrite existing files.
  4. perlexpr: Perl Expression.

For better understanding of this utility, we’ve discussed few practical examples of this command in the article.

1. A Basic Rename Command Example

Suppose you’ve bunch of files with “.html” extension and you want to rename all “.html” files to “.php” at one go. For example, first do a “ls -l” to check the list of files with “.html” extension.

# ravisaive@tecmint:~$ ls -l
total 22532
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6888896 Oct 10 12:10 cricket.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  588895 Oct 10 12:10 entertainment.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6188895 Oct 10 12:10 health.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6538895 Oct 10 12:10 lifestyle.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  938895 Oct 10 12:10 news.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  938937 Oct 10 12:11 photos.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  978137 Oct 10 12:11 sports.html

Now, you want to change the extension of all these files from “.html” to “.php“. You can use the following “rename” command with perl expression as shown below.

ravisaive@tecmint:~$ rename 's/\.html$/\.php/' *.html

Note: In the above command we’ve used two arguments.

  1. First argument is a perl expression that substitute .html with .php.
  2. Second argument tells the rename command to substitute all the files with *.php.

Let’s verify whether all files are renamed to “.php” extension, doing ls -l on the prompt.

ravisaive@tecmint:~$ ls -l
total 22532
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6888896 Oct 10 12:10 cricket.php
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  588895 Oct 10 12:10 entertainment.php
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6188895 Oct 10 12:10 health.php
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6538895 Oct 10 12:10 lifestyle.php
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  938895 Oct 10 12:10 news.php
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  938937 Oct 10 12:11 photos.php
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  978137 Oct 10 12:11 sports.php

Now you can see above that all the html files are renamed to php.

2. Check Changes Before Running Rename Command

While doing critical or major renaming tasks, you can always check the changes by running rename command with “-n” argument. The “-n” parameter will tell you exactly what changes would take place, but the changes are not done for real. Here, is the example of the command below.

ravisaive@tecmint:~$ rename -n 's/\.php$/\.html/' *.php

cricket.php renamed as cricket.html
entertainment.php renamed as entertainment.html
health.php renamed as health.html
lifestyle.php renamed as lifestyle.html
news.php renamed as news.html
photos.php renamed as photos.html
sports.php renamed as sports.html

Note: The above command output only displays changes, but in real the changes are not done, unless you run the command without “-n” switch.

3. Print Rename Output

We saw that the rename command didn’t displayed any information of changes it does. So, if you want to get the details of rename command (like we did using “-n” option), here we use “-v” option to print the complete details of all the changes done by rename command successfully.

ravisaive@tecmint:~$ rename -v 's/\.php$/\.html/' *.php

cricket.php renamed as cricket.html
entertainment.php renamed as entertainment.html
health.php renamed as health.html
lifestyle.php renamed as lifestyle.html
news.php renamed as news.html
photos.php renamed as photos.html
sports.php renamed as sports.html

4. Convert all Lowercase to Uppercase and Vise-Versa

To batch rename all files with lower case names to upper case. For example, I want to covert all these following files from lower to upper case.

Lower to Upper Case
ravisaive@tecmint:~$ ls -l
total 22532
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6888896 Oct 10 12:10 cricket.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  588895 Oct 10 12:10 entertainment.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6188895 Oct 10 12:10 health.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6538895 Oct 10 12:10 lifestyle.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  938895 Oct 10 12:10 news.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  938937 Oct 10 12:11 photos.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  978137 Oct 10 12:11 sports.html

Just, use the following command with perl expression.

ravisaive@tecmint:~$ rename 'y/a-z/A-Z/' *.html

Once you’ve executed the above command, you can check the changes by doing “ls -l“.

ravisaive@tecmint:~$ ls -l
total 22532
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6888896 Oct 10 12:10 CRICKET.HTML
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  588895 Oct 10 12:10 ENTERTAINMENT.HTML
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6188895 Oct 10 12:10 HEALTH.HTML
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6538895 Oct 10 12:10 LIFESTYLE.HTML
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  938895 Oct 10 12:10 NEWS.HTML
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  938937 Oct 10 12:11 PHOTOS.HTML
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  978137 Oct 10 12:11 SPORTS.HTML

You can see that the above command actually renamed all the lower case file names (with .HTML extension) to upper case.

Upper to Lower Case

Similarly, you can also convert all upper case characters to lower case using the following command.

ravisaive@tecmint:~$ rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *.HTML
ravisaive@tecmint:~$ ls -l
total 22532
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6888896 Oct 10 12:10 cricket.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  588895 Oct 10 12:10 entertainment.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6188895 Oct 10 12:10 health.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive 6538895 Oct 10 12:10 lifestyle.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  938895 Oct 10 12:10 news.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  938937 Oct 10 12:11 photos.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ravisaive ravisaive  978137 Oct 10 12:11 sports.html

5. Capitalize First Letter of Filename

To capitalize only first letter of each filename use the following command.

# rename 's/\b(\w)/\U$1/g' *.ext
Capitalize First Letter Filename
Capitalize First Letter Filename

6. Overwrite Existing Files

If you would like to forcefully overwrite existing files, use the “-f” option as shown below.

ravisaive@tecmint:~$ rename -f 's/a/b/' *.html

If you would like to know more about rename command, type the “man rename” in the terminal.

The rename command is very useful, if you are dealing with multiple or batch renaming of files from the command line. Do give a try and let me know, how far is useful in terms of renaming of files.

Ravi Saive
I am an experienced GNU/Linux expert and a full-stack software developer with over a decade in the field of Linux and Open Source technologies

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65 thoughts on “Rename – A Command Line Tool For Renaming Multiple Files in Linux”

  1. Hi Everyone,

    I have nearly 500 output files named from ‘xx00‘ to ‘xx 499‘, I want to change it for example to: ‘bb00‘ to ‘bb499‘.

    Please I need your help

    Sincerely
    MRasheed

    Reply
  2. Thanks. I’ve written my own ‘rename‘ utility long ago and find this from your article now.

    Two to correct:

    1. In example “rename ‘s/\.html$/\.php/’ *.html“, the REPLACEMENT part is just a STRING or EXPRESSION(if /e specified), so the backslash for .php is redundant.

    2. “Second argument tells the rename command to substitute all the files with *.php." – a typo, should be "*.html".

    Reply
  3. You showed how to rename file extensions. How do rename multiple file names that are complete different? Like, if I have five files named: tentwo-23.png, goingeasy.png, fear.png, samson(7).png, and support.png. And I want to name them 1.png, 2.png, 3.png, etc.

    Reply
  4. I am switching from windows. I would like to know if there is a way to do something like windows does: Select all files in a folder, right click on one of them, select rename, type something like “aaa” and press enter.

    There could be 2 files or 2,000, but lets say there were 5. The result would be 5 files named as such:
    aaa(1)
    aaa(2)
    aaa(3)
    aaa(4)
    aaa(5)
    This would save a lot of time.

    Reply
  5. Thanks for your post!

    Please add other section to capitalize only first letter of each filename.

    # rename 's/\b(\w)/\U$1/g' *.ext
    
    Reply
        • @Philippe,

          The command rename 's/\b(\w)/\U$1/g' *.ext is is used to rename files with a specific extension in the current directory by modifying their names according to a regular expression pattern.

          Let’s break down the components of the command:

          • s/ – Indicates a substitution operation.
          • \b – Represents a word boundary, ensuring that only the first character of each word is affected.
          • (\w) – Captures a word character and stores it in a capturing group.
          • \U$1 – Converts the captured character to uppercase.
          • /g – Global flag, meaning it applies the substitution globally (to all occurrences).
          • *.ext – Specifies the files to be renamed. In this case, it selects all files with the extension ".ext" in the current directory.
          Reply
  6. Hi,

    I am trying to rename multiple files in Centos7.

    For example: File I have:

    file1.html
    file2.html
    file3.html
    file3.html
    

    I want to rename them to:

    test1.html
    test2.html
    test3.html
    test4.html
    

    How can I achieve this?

    Thank you!

    Reply
    • # rename -n 's/file*/test/' *.html
      

      Then remove the -n switch when you are ready to run it for real

      Here is my validation of running a test for you

      user@host:~/Desktop/Junk/test$ touch file1.html
      user@host:~/Desktop/Junk/test$ touch file2.html
      user@host:~/Desktop/Junk/test$ touch file3.html
      user@host:~/Desktop/Junk/test$ touch file4.html
      user@host:~/Desktop/Junk/test$ rename -n 's/file*/test/' *.html
      rename(file1.html, test1.html)
      rename(file2.html, test2.html)
      rename(file3.html, test3.html)
      rename(file4.html, test4.html)
      user@host:~/Desktop/Junk/test$
      
      Reply
  7. I’m running Linux kernel version 106100LC004 2.6.32-573.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Jul 1 18:23:37 EDT 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux. And, my ‘rename‘ command expressions are like this:

    # rename .html .php *.html
    

    I then made an alias to shorten this command.

    # ren () { rename "$1" "$2" *"$1"; }
    

    So now my version is:

    # ren .html .php
    
    Reply
  8. Hi Ravi,

    This is great post, but in my case I tries nothing happening, can you please help me on this, I’m trying below. Something is wrong ?

    rename -n ‘s/\.txt/\.html/’ *.txt

    Reply
    • @Samim,

      Its due to wrong commas, used in the command, try to use the correct commas as shown in the following command.

      # rename -n 's/\.txt/\.html/' *.txt
      
      Reply
  9. if rename has some problems and different implementations (as suggested in some of the comments), then why is it any better than ‘sed’, which is decades older and very stable and well-documented?

    Reply
  10. I got thousand of files with space in a folder. It is from Windows or something. I hate filename with spaces. What should I type in terminal to remove the space from the filename?

    Reply
  11. Be careful – the version of rename(1) on debian/ubuntu is based on Perl while the version on the red hat family isn’t – therefore the expressions aren’t portable.

    Also to upcase

    rename -n ‘$_ = uc’ *

    To downcase

    rename -n ‘$_ = lc’ *

    Reply
  12. Backing up postfix mail files from mail server to WIN7 PC. The original mail files are named like this:

    1438761535.V902I1d8352eM884071.server.domain.com:2,S

    Windows has an issue with the extention and files are copied with size 0, and recognizes them as .com executable. I discovered that it works fine when renaming the file to _com. I can even copy them over to a new mail server, and they are recognized by the new postfix server.

    My plan now is:

    cp /postfix/files/path/*.server.domain.com:2,S /home/user/mail_backup/.

    next I tried this command, but nothing is happening, so I must be doing something wrong:

    rename -n ‘s/\.com:2,S$/\_com/’ *.com:2,S

    Please your advice.

    Reply
    • @Polar
      Give a try again with the help of following command with little modification.

      # rename -n 's/\.com/\_com/' *.com
      
      Reply
  13. You just saved 4 hours of my time and made me to do the same job of 4 hours in just 2 minutes. :) Amazing tips. This is why Linux is Awesome.
    Thank you very much for your help :)

    Reply
  14. Great! I works in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Can you please explain the perl expressions also?
    I don’t get the pattern where and why to use “s/ $/” or “y/” etc. It’ll be helpful if you explain it a little.

    Reply
  15. to rename files use, rename ‘y/A-Z/a-z/’ *

    what does the y do? I’m searching all over perlexpr tutorials to find out. It is doing similar to tr but cannot find a definite answer. Thanks.

    Reply
  16. The rename command used by the slackware family does not support regexes. The rename command via debuntu family does. Redhat family, I dunno. The debuntu rename command is more powerful, but see the manpage or -help option for your OS’ rename command.

    Reply
  17. Hi all. Not sure if this will help or not, but a few years back I wrote a script to deal with the Cygwin environment not having a reasonable implementation of the “rename” command line tool.

    http://nylinuxhelp.com/blogs/command-line/cygwin-rename-command-help

    Feel free to use the script (copy and paste it) and of course there is a “use at own risk” text on the page. I think with small modification you should be able to use it in a Linux distro.

    Cheers,
    Adam

    Reply
  18. For those that are still having issues with the “rename” utility, you must keep in mind that the “rename” utility that is present in Debian distributions is not the same utility found in non-Debian distributions. The one found in Debian distributions is the Perl version.

    I was rather frustrated myself when trying to perform this on my CentOS box. There are workarounds to install the Debian rename utility on non-Debian distributions. I haven’t been able to fine a straightforward way of installing it on non-Debian distros though. Maybe someone can post a quick link for that. Other than that, the syntax works perfectly if you use the correct utility.

    Reply
  19. If the regexp (s///) doesn’t work for you, you probably have an older version of rename. Try this syntax:

    rename ‘,’ ‘.’ [filenames…]

    The above will rename files substituting commas with full-stops.

    Reply
  20. Hi. I have multiple files with a “fn_” prefix in the filename. For example the file is called fn_00_11.jpg and I need to remove fn_ from all the files in the directory so that the filename is like, for example, 00_11.jpg. How can I do this via SSH?? Please help.

    Kindest regards,
    Shaun

    Reply
  21. Hi, can you help me with the expression? How could i change the
    test 1.txt
    test 2.txt
    test 3.txt

    files to

    new 1.txt
    new 2.txt
    new 3.txt

    And I will learn? Should i look for perl exressions?

    Thank you,
    Manolis

    Reply
  22. Hi

    Can you please tell if these command will work at remote FTP server as well.
    I need to rename multiple files there.

    Thank you

    Reply
  23. Tried te same its not working …. please help

    rename ‘s/\.html$/\.php/’ *.html
    You have new mail in /var/spool/mail/root
    [root@sl73psep3v14 temp]# ll -rth
    total 4.0K
    -rw-r—– 1 root root 0 Apr 15 03:50 c.html
    -rw-r—– 1 root root 0 Apr 15 03:50 b.html
    -rw-r—– 1 root root 0 Apr 15 03:50 a.html
    -rwx—— 1 root root 97 Apr 15 04:27 tt.sh

    [some@host temp]# vi /var/spool/mail/root
    [some@host temp]#

    Reply
      • Bro you keep telling people they are wrong, you are wrong.

        I can show you the man output -v -n are not even options, like someone else said it’s a different command and it’s where you said so there is confusion.

        [root@Cent06 tmp]# rpm -qf /usr/bin/rename
        util-linux-ng-2.17.2-12.14.el6_5.x86_64

        The rename command is part of this package and it doesn’t work at all like you said that’s it, nothing to do with quotes, you need to tell people which package and which OS is the one you are talking about and I see from others its maybe Ubuntu but not everyone using Ubuntu as a server.

        I can’t stand seeing someone telling everyone else they are wrong, unfortunately you are probably correct with a version of rename that is less common, does that make sense sir?

        the command that I’m mentioning to you, the /usr/bin/rename works like this

        rename ‘string’ ‘string2’ *.txt

        That’s it, no regex and it sucks, I had to load a project to get the functionality you are mentioning which is easily written to a bash or perl script.

        Reply
  24. I have tried rename ‘s/.,\ //’ * to strip leading “., ” in folder names but in vain. Can anyone please tell me how to do it ?

    Reply
  25. Another possibility as to why it’s not working is because they’re using an old version of rename. On my system, the version it’s running is util-linux-ng 2.17.2.

    This version does not appear to support backreferences, or the ‘s///’ regular expression replacement syntax.

    My system is running centos which I’m not as familiar with as I am with ubuntu.

    Anyone know where I can get the most up to date rename binary installed using yum?

    Reply
  26. i tried your above said CLI but they didn’t work for me below are the results
    [root@monitor noc]# ll
    total 0
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file1.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file2.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file3.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file4.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file5.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file6.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file7.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file8.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file9.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:51 file.txt
    [root@monitor noc]# which rename
    /usr/bin/rename
    [root@monitor noc]#
    [root@monitor noc]# rename -v ‘s/\.txt$/\.html/’ *.txt
    [root@monitor noc]# ll
    total 0
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file1.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file2.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file3.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file4.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file5.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file6.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file7.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file8.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:52 file9.txt
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 Nov 4 05:51 file.txt

    Reply
      • Sir i have tried by copying the syntax which you have mentioned but still i face the same error :(

        [kiran@labmac ~]$ touch file{1..9}.txt
        [kiran@labmac ~]$ ll
        total 0
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file1.txt
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file2.txt
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file3.txt
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file4.txt
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file5.txt
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file6.txt
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file7.txt
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file8.txt
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file9.txt
        [kiran@labmac ~]$ rename -v ‘s/\.txt$/\.html/’ *.txt
        [kiran@labmac ~]$ ll
        total 0
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file1.txt
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file2.txt
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file3.txt
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file4.txt
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file5.txt
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file6.txt
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file7.txt
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file8.txt
        -rw-rw-r–. 1 kiran kiran 0 Nov 9 15:11 file9.txt
        [kiran@labmac ~]$

        Reply
          • this command did not show any error but also have not any effect of this command –
            #rename ‘s/\.html$/\.php/’ *.html

            but, after seeing rename man page…
            #rename .html .php *.html
            above command had work

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