Rename all files in a folder with a prefix in a single command

Situation:

We have certificate.key certificate.crt inside /user/ssl/

We want to rename anything that starts with certificate to certificate_OLD

We are now located inside /user

First, you do a dry run with -n:

rename -n "s/certificate/certificate_old/" ./ssl/*

Which returns:

rename(./ssl/certificate.crt, ./ssl/certificate_OLD.crt) rename(./ssl/certificate.key, ./ssl/certificate_OLD.key)

Your files will be unchanged this is just a test run.

Solution:

When your happy with the result of the test run it for real:

rename "s/certificate/certificate_OLD/" ./ssl/*

What it means:

`rename "s/ SOMETHING / SOMETING_ELSE " PATH/FILES

Tip:

If you are already on the path run it like this:

rename "s/certificate/certificate_OLD/" *

Or if you want to do this in any sub-directory starting with ss do:

rename -n "s/certificat/certificate_old/" ./ss*/*

You can also do:

rename -n "s/certi*/certificate_old/" ./ss*/*

Which renames anything starting with certi in any sub-directory starting with ss.

The sky is the limit.

Play around with regex and ALWAYS test this BEFORE with -n.

WATCH OUT THIS WILL EVEN RENAME FOLDER NAMES THAT MATCH. Better cd into the directory and do it there. USE AT OWN RISK.

find -execdir rename

This renames files and directories with a regular expression affecting only basenames.

So for a prefix you could do:

PATH=/usr/bin find . -depth -execdir rename 's/^/Unix_/' '{}' \;

or to affect files only:

PATH=/usr/bin find . -type f -execdir rename 's/^/Unix_/' '{}' \;

-execdir first cds into the directory before executing only on the basename.

I have explained it in more detail at: Find multiple files and rename them in Linux