I need to change the postfixes of all files (all the same .JPEG) to .jpeg (Capital vs. lower case).
Is there a quick way of doing so?
7 Answers
Use the Perl program rename
which is installed by default:
rename 's/\.JPEG$/.jpeg/' *.JPEG
The first argument is a Perl regular expression matching filenames ending with .JPEG
and replaces it with .jpeg
.
The second argument selects the files that should be matched, in your case every file in the current directory ending on .JPEG
. You could specify a different location of course:
rename 's/\.JPEG$/.jpeg/' ~/Pictures/*.JPEG
Other answers I've seen:
rename s/.JPEG$/.jpeg/ *
- this will also rename files likeStupidJPEG
toStupi.jpeg
because the dot is matches any character..JPEG$
is a regular expressionrename 's/\.JPEG$/\.jpeg/' *
- works, but it's less efficient because it passes all files in the current directory torename
.rename -n 's/.JPEG$/.jpeg/' *.JPEG
- the-n
option would show the files being renamed, without actually renaming them ("dry run"). Because*.JPEG
matches files postfixed with.JPEG
only, the dot-matches-all issue is non-existent here.
-
1The second dot does not need to be escaped because it's not part of the matching expression. In a regular expression,
.
matches any character (with a few exceptions), therefore the dot needs to be escaped in the regular expression\.JPEG$
. Jun 11, 2011 at 20:56 -
This also works:
for i in *.JPEG; do mv $i $(basename $i .JPEG).jpeg; done
– crazy2beJun 11, 2011 at 23:43 -
@crazy2be: Make an answer of it. It's useful in case
rename
is not available. Also,$(basename $i .JPEG)
can be replaced with${i%%.JPEG}
(bash extension) Jun 12, 2011 at 8:36
Although this is possibly not the best solution for this particular usage case,
for i in *.JPEG; do mv "$i" "$(basename "$i" .JPEG).jpeg"; done
also works. We can do some trickyness with bash in order to slightly increase efficiency (avoiding in invocation of an additional sub-process in the inner loop), ending up with:
for i in *.JPEG; do mv "$i" "${i%%.JPEG}.jpeg"; done
This solution is most useful if you want to do something else in additon to renaming the files, such as logging what names were changed, or even just doing a dry run to ensure that it does what you want.
-
I recommend putting the variables between double quotes, it's not uncommon for images to have spaces in their names. Jun 13, 2011 at 8:53
-
Done! I forgot about that, it worked in my test (files named 1-1000.JPEG sequentially) :P.– crazy2beJun 14, 2011 at 4:39
There is a tool for this:
sudo apt-get install renameutils
or click renameutils
(if not already installed)
where you can do (from command line):
rename s/\.JPEG$/\.jpeg/ *.JPEG
Found it a second after posting:
rename 's/\.JPEG$/.jpeg/' *
-
1A small optimization, but for a large amount of files, my answer (and tgm's answer) are preferred because it sends less files to
rename
for parsing.*
matches everything in a directory where*.JPEG
would really match just the files postfixed with.JPEG
. Jun 11, 2011 at 21:06
Use the rename command. It's different than move and often is causes confusion because it was specifically created with picture renaming in mind.
Something like this command should work (for all files that end in .JPEG, change .JPEG to .jpeg)
rename -n 's/.JPEG$/.jpeg/' *.JPEG
Doing things in parallel is getting more and more important, hence I recommend:
parallel mv {} {.}.jpg ::: *.JPG
This utility is not installed by default though.
-
Nice to know about this, but I really need something quick and Dirty, and do not really care for performance/efficiency Jun 12, 2011 at 11:33
If you are looking for a nice GUI solution and don't want to muck about with complicated command line arguments, there is a great Nautilus script available to rename files. It has a simple interface and many options.
Available here: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Renamer?content=87601