Rename all files and directory names

Posted under » Linux on 09 November 2017

To lowercase

There are several ways to achieve this, but we’ll explain two of the most efficient and reliable methods. For the purpose of this guide, we have used a directory named Images which has the following structure:

find Images -depth

-depth lists each directory's contents before the directory itself. So lets rename them.

find Images -depth | xargs -n 1 rename -v 's/(.*)\/([^\/]*)/$1\/\L$2/' {} \;

Another alternative way using the find and mv commands in a bash script as explained below. Lets call this script "rename-files.sh".

#!/bin/bash
#print usage 
if [ -z $1 ];then
echo "Usage :$(basename $0) parent-directory"
exit 1
fi
#process all subdirectories and files in parent directory
all="$(find $1 -depth)"
for name in ${all}; do
#set new name in lower case for files and directories
new_name="$(dirname "${name}")/$(basename "${name}" | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]')"
#check if new name already exists
if [ "${name}" != "${new_name}" ]; then
[ ! -e "${new_name}" ] && mv -T "${name}" "${new_name}"; echo "${name} was renamed to ${new_name}" || echo "${name} wasn't renamed!"
fi
done
echo
echo
#list directories and file new names in lowercase
echo "Directories and files with new names in lowercase letters"
find $(echo $1 | tr 'A-Z' 'a-z') -depth
exit 0

Then run it like so

rename-files.sh Images

Changing files extension

If you want to change your files extension, unfortunately "mv *.xml *.txt" will not work. You have to use some bash and regex for this.

# Rename all *.xml to *.txt
for f in *.xml; do 
    mv -- "$f" "${f%.xml}.txt"
done