Is there a linux command like mv but with regex?

Question

For example I want to mv (.*?).sql $1.php,

is there a command that lets me specify renaming patterns?

Answer 1

As others have mentioned, rename is good at this, but read the man page (man rename) before you try it. There are at least two entirely different tools out there called rename and which one you have will depend on your distribution. Calling them incorrectly can be dangerous.

Here's the man page for the perl-based version by Larry Wall that ships with Ubuntu. You give it a perl expression like rename 's/\.sql$/.php/' *.sql

Here's the man page for the rename that ships with older Red Hat and CentOS distributions. Usage is simple string substitution like rename .sql .php *.sql

You could also use a bash one-liner to process each file one at a time:

$ for f in *.sql; do mv -i "$f" "${f%%.*}.php"; done

Answer 2

There's rename(1), which doesn't use regexes, but can solve your problem:

rename .sql .php *.sql

There's also mmv(1), but I'm unfamiliar with how it works.

Answer 3

rename may be for you. The one on my system (Ubuntu Linux) is a Perl script which takes regular expressions.

Answer 4

Yes - it is called rename.

Answer 5

G'day,

You could also try entering

for i in $(\ls -d *.sql)
do
mv $i $(echo $i | sed -e 's/\.sql$/\.php/')
done

Or to make it use regex's change it slightly to

for i in $(\ls -d | egrep -e '.*\.sql')
do
mv $i $(echo $i | sed -e 's/\.sql$/\.php/')
done

for a bit of shell coding fun. (-:

Answer 6

You could use a combination with find, grep and xargs