Mac – Rename vm (files) on vmware workstation

1. Your last variant is the correct one to use single inside double quotes -- but you have to escape also the $1 otherwise the shell will expand it:

   "/.*(\d\d).jpg/Foo's Excellent Photo - \$1.jpg/"
   

2. However, I still get the error

   Bareword found where operator expected at (eval 1) line 1, near "/.*(\d\d).jpg/Foo's"
       (Missing operator before Foo's?)
   syntax error at (eval 1) line 1, near "/.*(\d\d).jpg/Foo's Excellent "
   

   But this is not because of wrong quoting, but because perl-rename expects a perl regex. And you obviously want to search and replace, so use s/.../.../, not only /.../.../.

3. So, summing up, this command works flawlessly:

   $ rename -n  "s/.*(\d\d).jpg/Foo's Excellent Photo - \$1.jpg/" *
   PIC44.jpg renamed as Foo's Excellent Photo - 44.jpg
   PIC45.jpg renamed as Foo's Excellent Photo - 45.jpg
   

^{There's no question in this question, so I just assume you want to understand the situation.}

Your guest Ubuntu machine is unusable and it is indicated by the error messages in the console starting with:

run-init: /sbin/init: No such file or directory

The error in the VMware Player is just a result of the guest machine not being able to start correctly. Per KB2000542:

The error message is seen when a guest operating system running in a VMware virtual machine intentionally halts the virtual CPU by executing the instructions CLI and HLT in succession. This can occur during a critical error or fault within the guest operating system.

This error can occur in:

• Windows virtual machines - Caused by the guest operating system crashing (BSOD).
• Linux virtual machines - Caused by kernel panic can also generate those messages.

Either you have a disk configuration problem, or your guest machine became corrupted and you should create a new one.

After that you might try to mount the affected machine disk to retrieve data or further troubleshoot the problem.