What mass file renaming tools are available?

Question

I need to rename a bunch of files in order to fix their sort order, therefore I need to be able to do a sort of "find and replace" so I can replace chunks of the filenames at a time.

What tools should I use? I prefer GUI but a command line tool recommendation would also be fine.

Answer 1

There are a few but I recommend gprename which is a good compromise between usability and functionality.

Other tools are: rename, krename , pyrenamer , cuteRenamer, ...

Answer 2

Métamorphose

http://file-folder-ren.sourceforge.net/

may be a little difficult to handle, but really powerful!

Answer 3

http://tips.webdesign10.com/how-to-bulk-rename-files-in-linux-in-the-terminal might help you. But it uses the command line.

Answer 4

thunar file manager is a GUI with a bulk rename option

http://thunar.xfce.org/pwiki/documentation/bulk_renamer

it's not standard on Gnome but can be installed through the software centre

Answer 5

I really like qmv from the renameutils package. It enables you to use your favorite (terminal based) text editor to rename files. I prefer to invoke it with -f do which gives you a single column (one row per file) with filenames. Combined with the power of Vim it gives you all the tools you need to do massive filename editing.

http://www.nongnu.org/renameutils/

Answer 6

If you like the shell and perl regular expressions I'd recommend rename. It's as plain as it's name.

Answer 7

I tend to use mmv, which is command-line based, and has a somewhat quirky expression syntax but tend to solve most of my problems.

Answer 8

On the command line theres also the possibility to use magic of sed and shell:

ls *.c | sed "s#\(.*\)\.c#mv \0 \1.cpp#" | sh