Linux Command Line – How to Rename Files Starting with a Hyphen

The difference between "-" and "no hyphen" is that the latter keeps your existing environment (variables, etc); the former creates a new environment (with the settings of the actual user, not your own).

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Su

The hyphen has two effects:

1) switches from the current directory to the home directory of the new user (e.g., to /root in the case of the root user) by logging in as that user

2) changes the environmental variables to those of the new user as dictated by their ~/.bashrc. That is, if the first argument to su is a hyphen, the current directory and environment will be changed to what would be expected if the new user had actually logged on to a new session (rather than just taking over an existing session).

Get the creation time of the file use stat command. The output will be in seconds (since unix epoch).

• -n option suppresses the newline at end of output.

• -f permits use of "printf" formatting. %B is the creation or "birth" date of the file.

  D=$(stat -nf'%B' your_file)
  

Then use date -r option to input date in seconds. The +%Y... aargument specifies the date format.

   DF=$(date -r $D '+%Y%m%d_%H%M')

The bash scripting would be something like this-:

 export PREFIX="your_prefix"
 D=$(stat -nf'%B' your_file)            # seconds since creation time of file
 DF=$(date -r $D '+%Y%m%d_%H%M')             # formatted creation date/time
 mv your_file "${PREFIX}_your_file_${DF}.txt"  # rename the file