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nux
Asked: 2014-03-09 07:15:10 +0800 CST

Rename files incrementally in a specific directory?

  • 772

I have a directory containing bunch of .txt files , I need a command to rename these files by one command , so their name will be : file1.txt , file2.txt, file3.txt , etc .

Any Help ?

scripts

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can use this in terminal to rename files as you wished,

    j=1;for i in *.txt; do mv "$i" file"$j".txt; let j=j+1;done

    It will do the job.

    Explanation:

    • Set a counter j, initially set it to 1
    • Initiate a for loop and use a shell glob *.txt to obtain all txt files.
    • for each file rename it using mv and increase the counter by 1.
    • 20

  2. You can use the rename command, which is usually included in a default installation:

    c=0 rename 's/.*/sprintf("file%05d.txt", ++$ENV{c})/e' *

    Use the -n flag if you want to do a test first:

    c=0 rename -n 's/.*/sprintf("file%05d.txt", ++$ENV{c})/e' *

    The way this works is, for each argument, it executes the perl s/// expression, and performs the rename from the original to the replaced string. In the replacement string I use sprintf to format the name, where I use the environment variable c as the counter from 1.

    In most cases you also may need leading "0" for each number, %05d does the trick, where 5 is number of digits.

    • 8

  3. The following command will also rename files incrementally :

    cd (directory containing files )

    Then run this script :

    count=1
for i in *; do
    mv "${i}" file${count}.`echo "${i}" | awk -F. '{print $2}'`
    ((++count))

done
    • 2