Rename-Tool

rename-tool is a commandline tool to rename files. It can change, lowercase and uppercase a batch of files or modify their ownership. It's a small and quick tool written in C so it's quicker than most rename tools written in shell scripts. rename-tool is powered by the extended regular expression for searching and substituting string patterns in the file names.

rename-tool is a fork of renamex written by Andy Xuming [email protected]. Since this project is dead since several years now, I've decided to fork it to add some new features I want to have.

Features

• substitue strings in file's name
• search and substitue strings in file's name by regular expression
• uppercase or lowercase file's name
• support batch renaming
• recursively processing directories and subdirectories
• change ownership of files
• safe mode: test before you go

Install

Download rename distribution then unpack it with tar -zxf:

~~~~
make
make install
~~~~

BUGS reporting

Please report bugs at the project page at github.

Examples

• To lowercase all files' names recursively.

  rename-tool -l -R *
  

• Substitute all 'abc' substrings appeared in C sources files with 'xyz', ignoring the case, then uppercase the whole file name.

  rename-tool -u -s/abc/xyz/gi *.c
  

• Find all files with the '.c' suffix in the current directory and change them to '.cpp' suffix. Print the verbose information.

  rename-tool -v -s/.c/.cpp/s *
  

• Find all files with the '.c' suffix under the current directory and change them to '.cpp' suffix by the list file.

  find . -name *.c > filename.lst
  rename-tool -s/.c/.cpp/s -f filename.lst
  

• Read names from the 'filename.lst', find the last occurrence of 'abc' and replace it with '12345', ignoring the case.

  rename-tool -s/abc/12345/bi *
  

• The target substring starts with a capital letter, and ends with string 'file'. There are 0 or any numbers of characters between the capital letter and 'file'. The substring, if encountered in filenames, will be replaced with 'nofile'.

  rename-tool -s/^[A-Z].*file/nofile/r *
  

• Similar to above, except it uses extended regular expression, such as the '+' metacharacter, and replaces all matching strings with 'nofile'.

  rename-tool -s/^[A-Z].+file/nofile/eg *
  

• Test mode only. Simulate the rename process but no files would be actually changed.

  rename-tool -t -s/^[A-Z].+file/nofile/eg *
  

• change the ownership of /home/custom to 'guest'. The 'guest' should be an effective user in the current system. If /home/custom is a directory, all files' ownership in this directory tree will be changed to 'guest'.

  rename-tool -o guest -R /home/custom