How to rename all subfolders with a specific Name

Question

How to go through all the subfolders and rename all the folders named 'Old' to 'New'

Answer 1

If you have zsh:

autoload zmv
zmv -QW '**/Old(/)' '**/New'

zmv -W '**/Old' '**/New'

Here autoload zmv loads zmv script that comes with zsh; zmv -W pattern replacement means «for each match remember value of all wildcards in pattern and replace corresponding wildcard characters in replacement with this value»; zmv -Q means «allow glob qualifiers in pattern»; '**/Old' means «match all files named «Old» in the tree under current directory» and (/) glob qualifier restricts «all files» to be only directories. Other useful zmv options:

• -n: do not do anything, just print what will be done.
• -i: show each line to be executed and ask whether to execute it
• -f: force overwriting of destination files

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If you prefer [ba]sh:

RnAll() { for f in "$1"/* ; do [ -d "$f" ] || continue ; ( RnAll "$f" "$2" "$3" ) ; [ "`basename $f`" \== "$2" ] && mv "$f" "`dirname $f`/$3" ; done }
RnAll . Old New

This is almost pure sh (or at least bash) solution, that does not require anything but shell and coreutils.

Answer 2

Something like this:

find . -type d -exec rename <rename options> \;

The rename options will vary depending on which rename you have. Red Hat rename uses rename Old New {}, whereas Debian/Ubuntu systems often use "Perl rename", which would use this syntax:

rename 's/^Old$/New/' {} 

That will only change exact matches for "Old"; use s/Old/New/g if you want to change all occurrances of "Old" to "New", including multiple occurrances within one foldername.