Terminal command to rename files in bulk with wild cards?

You'll get a bunch of answers on how to do this, using foreach loops and various perl scripts.

In zsh, which should be the OS X default shell, this is very easy.

To start zsh, just type "zsh"

To make it your default shell, just issue "chsh -s /bin/zsh"

Once you are in zsh, you need do only two things (which you can put in your ~/.zshrc file for safe-keeping and automation):

autoload -U zmv
alias mmv="noglob zmv -W"

Now you have a simple command to do as you want:

mmv myfile.*.1 myfile.*

I suspect

mmv myfile.r??.1 myfile.r??

does the same thing. The ? is a wildcard for a single space.

You can call "mmv" anything you want, like "rename".

I like to use awk to build a list of commands. When it looks ok, I feed it to bash:
<pre style="padding-left: .75ex; padding-top: .25em; padding-bottom: .25em; margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em; margin-left: 1ex; max-width: 80ex; overflow: auto; font-size: 9px; font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; color: #222; background: #ddd; line-height: normal">ls | awk '{org=$0; sub(/\.[^\.]*$/,""); printf("mv %s %s\n", org, $0);}'
mv myfile.r01.1 myfile.r01
mv myfile.r02.1 myfile.r02
</pre>

If you like that, pipe it sh:
<pre style="padding-left: .75ex; padding-top: .25em; padding-bottom: .25em; margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em; margin-left: 1ex; max-width: 80ex; overflow: auto; font-size: 9px; font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; color: #222; background: #ddd; line-height: normal">ls | awk '{org=$0; sub(/\.[^\.]*$/,""); printf("mv %s %s\n", org, $0);}' | sh
</pre>
--
Cole

Bill Scott wrote:
You'll get a bunch of answers on how to do this, using foreach loops and various perl scripts.

Actually, I wouldn't even bother that much. I would just get a directory listing, put it into a text file, do global search and replace to construct "mv" statements, then "sh" my text file.

In zsh, which should be the OS X default shell, this is very easy.

To start zsh, just type "zsh"

To make it your default shell, just issue "chsh -s /bin/zsh"

To be fair to other shells, you don't have to make zsh your default shell to use it.

autoload -U zmv
alias mmv="noglob zmv -W"

Bill,
Would you be kind enough to explain what all that does?

Cole,
You don't need to bother. Awk is way over my head. 🙂

Here is a command I use to change uppercase JPGs to lowercase:

find . -type f -name \*JPG -exec sh -c 'mv "$1" "${1//JPG/jpg}"' -- {} \;

Maybe there is something in there you can adapt.

If you want the solution is one command the zsh solution may be the easiest.

The best answer is a matter of preference.
Bill's right though about the thousands of 3-4 command possibilities with loops depending on which shell is used. The fact is regular expressions in UNIX are so powerful that many prefer that to a simple replace. Others may not want to get that technical.

Here is a solution using a for loop in sh, ksh, or bash

for file in myfile.r??.1
do
base=`basename $file .1`
mv $file $base
done

The for or foreach loop depending on shell will cycle through each string matching the regular expression.

basename is a command that removes the directory path and the specified regular expression suffix from any string. Each shell has additional similar constructs for manipulating any string in any way in one word.

To be fair to other shells, you don't have to make zsh your default shell to use it.

To be fair, I wrote just that.

Would you be kind enough to explain what all that does?

zsh comes with a bunch of functions that live in /usr/share/zsh/4.3.4/functions

The first line loads the function /usr/share/zsh/4.3.4/functions/zmv

The second line creates an alias to make that function (when invoked via the alias) behave in a way that is consistent with the "rename" command he was asking about.

Read the top of the zmv function file (it is a shell script) if you want the details.

Gnarlodious wrote:

find . -type f -name \*JPG -exec sh -c 'mv "$1" "${1//JPG/jpg}"' -- {} \;

Interesting construct. Thanks for sharing!

--
Cole

From this page: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part2/section-6.html

How do I rename "*.foo" to "*.bar", or change file names to lowercase?
 
 Why doesn't "mv *.foo *.bar" work? Think about how the shell
 expands wildcards. "*.foo" and "*.bar" are expanded before the
 mv command ever sees the arguments. Depending on your shell,
 this can fail in a couple of ways. CSH prints "No match."
 because it can't match "*.bar". SH executes "mv a.foo b.foo
 c.foo *.bar", which will only succeed if you happen to have a
 single directory named "*.bar", which is very unlikely and almost
 certainly not what you had in mind.
 Depending on your shell, you can do it with a loop to "mv" each
 file individually. If your system has "basename", you can use:
 C Shell:
 foreach f ( *.foo )
 set base=`basename $f .foo`
 mv $f $base.bar
 end
 Bourne Shell:
 for f in *.foo; do
 base=`basename $f .foo`
 mv $f $base.bar
 done
 Some shells have their own variable substitution features, so
 instead of using "basename", you can use simpler loops like:
 C Shell:
 foreach f ( *.foo )
 mv $f $f:r.bar
 end
 Korn Shell:
 for f in *.foo; do
 mv $f ${f%foo}bar
 done
 If you don't have "basename" or want to do something like
 renaming foo.* to bar.*, you can use something like "sed" to
 strip apart the original file name in other ways, but the general
 looping idea is the same. You can also convert file names into
 "mv" commands with 'sed', and hand the commands off to "sh" for
 execution. Try
 ls -d *.foo | sed -e 's/.*/mv & &/' -e 's/foo$/bar/' | sh
 A program by Vladimir Lanin called "mmv" that does this job
 nicely was posted to comp.sources.unix (Volume 21, issues 87 and
 88) in April 1990. It lets you use
 mmv '*.foo' '=1.bar'
 Shell loops like the above can also be used to translate file
 names from upper to lower case or vice versa. You could use
 something like this to rename uppercase files to lowercase:
 C Shell:
 foreach f ( * )
 mv $f `echo $f | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
 end
 Bourne Shell:
 for f in *; do
 mv $f `echo $f | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
 done
 Korn Shell:
 typeset -l l
 for f in *; do
 l="$f"
 mv $f $l
 done
 If you wanted to be really thorough and handle files with `funny'
 names (embedded blanks or whatever) you'd need to use
 Bourne Shell:
 for f in *; do
 g=`expr "xxx$f" : 'xxx(.*)' | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
 mv "$f" "$g"
 done
 The `expr' command will always print the filename, even if it
 equals `-n' or if it contains a System V escape sequence like `c'.
 Some versions of "tr" require the [ and ], some don't. It
 happens to be harmless to include them in this particular
 example; versions of tr that don't want the [] will conveniently
 think they are supposed to translate '[' to '[' and ']' to ']'.
 If you have the "perl" language installed, you may find this
 rename script by Larry Wall very useful. It can be used to
 accomplish a wide variety of filename changes.
 #!/usr/bin/perl
 #
 # rename script examples from lwall:
 # rename 's/.orig$//' *.orig
 # rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/ unless /^Make/' *
 # rename '$_ .= ".bad"' *.f
 # rename 'print "$_: "; s/foo/bar/ if <stdin> =~ /^y/i' *
 $op = shift;
 for (@ARGV) {
 $was = $_;
 eval $op;
 die $@ if $@;
 rename($was,$_) unless $was eq $_;
 }

I don't have access to dos, but am willing to bet what they call rename is that perl script Larry Wall wrote (syntax changed for dos).

All you need to do is put that "rename" perl script into a file, make it executable, and put it somewhere in your path, and the shell treats it just the same as if it were a compiled binary executable. So I guess the real question is why Apple doesn't do that.