Ubuntu – Renaming a bunch of files using Command-line

command line

Suppose I have a folder with thousands of photos named all randomly. How can one rename them as photo1, photo2,…,photo1000 from the command-line/terminal?

Best Answer

I will assume that you want to keep a proper suffix on the filenames:

c=1; for f in *.jpg ; do mv "$f" "photo$c.jpg" ; c=$(($c+1)) ; done

Notes

c=1: This initalizes the counter. You can set it to any number you like.
for f in *.jpg ; do: This signifies the beginning of a shell for-loop. While much of shell-scripting can be difficult to make work when file names can contain spaces, newlines or other difficult characters, this construction is safe against even the most hostile file names.
mv "$f" "photo$c.jpg": This uses the counter c and does the actual renaming of files. The file name $f is in double-quotes to protect the name from the various possible shell expansions.
c=$(($c+1)): This increments the counter for the next loop
done: The signifies the end of the for loop.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Using text list to batch-rename files

This looks like a job for xargs.

If your file is formatted like this:

old_file1 new_file1
old_file2 new_file2

then you can do xargs -a your_file -n 2 mv.

Ubuntu – Renaming images in specific order

Try Thunar, which is the default file manager for Xfce. It is very lightweight and comes with a handy bulk renaming tool. You can install Thunar by running the following command in Terminal:

sudo apt-get install thunar

You'll probably be able to install from Ubuntu Software too.

How to use the utility

Once you've installed Thunar, launch the Bulk Rename utility.
Click on the + icon and add the files you want to rename in the proper order.
Click on the drop-down box just below the list of selected files and select Numbering. Click on the box next to it and select Name Only.
In the "Start With:" box enter 501, leave the "Text:" box empty. You should see the preview of the changes in the New Name column.
To apply the changes click on the Rename Files button.

Besides Numbering this utility supports the following actions:

Insert Date / Time
Insert / Overwrite
Remove Characters
Search & Replace
Uppercase / Lowercase