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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | WARNING | EDGE CASES | INTERACTIVE MODE | EXIT STATUS | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | REPORTING BUGS | AVAILABILITY |
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RENAME(1) User Commands RENAME(1)
rename - rename files
rename [options] substring replacement file...
rename will rename the specified files by replacing the first
occurrence of substring in their name by replacement.
-s, --symlink
Do not rename a symlink but change where it points.
-v, --verbose
Show which files were renamed, if any.
-n, --no-act
Do not make any changes; add --verbose to see what would be
made.
-a, --all
Replace all occurrences of substring rather than only the
first one.
-l, --last
Replace the last occurrence of substring rather than the first
one.
-o, --no-overwrite
Do not overwrite existing files. When --symlink is active, do
not overwrite symlinks pointing to existing targets.
-i, --interactive
Ask before overwriting existing files.
-h, --help
Display help text and exit.
-V, --version
Display version and exit.
The renaming has no safeguards by default or without any one of
the options --no-overwrite, --interactive or --no-act. If the user
has permission to rewrite file names, the command will perform the
action without any questions. For example, the result can be quite
drastic when the command is run as root in the /lib directory.
Always make a backup before running the command, unless you truly
know what you are doing.
If substring is empty, then by default replacement will be added
to the start of the filename. With --all, replacement will be
inserted in between every two characters of the filename, as well
as at the start and end.
Normally, only the final path component of a filename is updated.
(Or with --symlink, only the final path component of the link.)
But if either substring or replacement contains a /, the full path
is updated. This can cause a file to be moved between folders.
Creating folders, and moving files between filesystems, is not
supported.
As most standard utilities rename can be used with a terminal
device (tty in short) in canonical mode, where the line is
buffered by the tty and you press ENTER to validate the user
input. If you put your tty in cbreak mode however, rename requires
only a single key press to answer the prompt. To set cbreak mode,
run for example:
sh -c 'stty -icanon min 1; "$0" "$@"; stty icanon' rename -i from to files
0
all requested rename operations were successful
1
all rename operations failed
2
some rename operations failed
4
nothing was renamed
64
unanticipated error occurred
Given the files foo1, ..., foo9, foo10, ..., foo278, the commands
rename foo foo00 foo?
rename foo foo0 foo??
will turn them into foo001, ..., foo009, foo010, ..., foo278. And
rename .htm .html *.htm
will fix the extension of your html files. Provide an empty string
for shortening:
rename '_with_long_name' '' file_with_long_name.*
will remove the substring in the filenames.
mv(1)
For bug reports, use the issue tracker
<https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues>.
The rename command is part of the util-linux package which can be
downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive
<https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>. This page is
part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux utilities)
project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩. If you have a
bug report for this manual page, send it to
util-linux@vger.kernel.org. This page was obtained from the
project's upstream Git repository
⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
2025-08-11. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that
was found in the repository was 2025-08-05.) If you discover any
rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page,
or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a
mail to man-pages@man7.org
util-linux 2.42-start-521-ec46 2025-08-09 RENAME(1)
Pages that refer to this page: rename(2), strverscmp(3)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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