When people give me files, especially images, coming from windows machines I always have problems with capitalised extensions. JPEG format files for instance appear as image.JPG instead of image.jpg. Worst case is that in some collections some file extensions appear capitalised while others in lower case.
I have searched the web for some simple solution to this problem and ended up seeing sed commands and pipes that UNIX gurus are so fond off,
So, if you wanted to rename all the .php3 to .php, this would be the command:
ls -d *.php3 | sed 's/\(.*\).php3$/mv "&" "\1.php"/' | sh
As Fortune keeps reminding me, there is more than one way to skin a cat
, so a more complete discussion on mass renaming with Linux can be found on Gareth Anderson's GNU/Linux Command-Line Tools Summary
book article directly accessible from here.
Anyway, after a little bit of googling, it turned out to my surprise that the simplest way to do this was inside my own Fedora distro. The magic command is rename and the man entry is small, simple and accurate :
RENAME(1) Linux Programmer’s Manual RENAME(1)
NAME
rename - Rename files
SYNOPSIS
rename from to file...
rename -V
DESCRIPTION
rename will rename the specified files by replacing the first occurrence of from in their name by to.
-V, --version
Display version information and exit.
For example, given the files
foo1, ..., foo9, foo10, ..., foo278, the commands
rename foo foo0 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.
SEE ALSO
mmv(1), mv(1)
AVAILABILITY
The rename command is part of the util-linux-ng package and is available from ftp://ftp.ker-
nel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/.
1 January 2000 RENAME(1)
The rename command is also available on all EL clones like (CentOS and Oracle EL).
