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I have around 300 files named
some_name_123456789.zip
another-name2_987654321.zip
something(1)_123454321.zip
[2]something_987656789.zip
I need to rename them all to
ds_123456789.zip
ds_987654321.zip
ds_123454321.zip
ds_987656789.zip
How can i do this?
You can do this with the rename command line utility. To do what you want you need a simple regular expression:
rename "s/.+_/ds/g"files
.+ represents everything up to (in this context) the last underscore (_) character (so this works with multiple underscores, as mentioned in your first example). This requires that there be at least one character before the underscore; if you might have file names like _20131012.zip, use .* instead. So this three-character string (.+_ or .*_) will match everything up to and including the last underscore in the filename. s/old/new/ means substitute the new string (ds) for the old string. The g means global and might not be necessary in this case.
^ to the beginning. Also OP wanted to retain the underscore. The g option at the end is not really needed here - it would match multiple instances in the file name if possible. So I think this command would perform better: rename "s/^.+_/ds_/" files
Oct 12, 2013 at 21:40
g is just a standard habit from me and i agree that it's not needed in this case.
find . -name "*.zip*" -exec rename "s/.+_/ds/g" {} \; where "{} \;" is the variable for the filename find returns.
or, using the cross-platform renamer:
$ renamer --regex --find '.+_' --replace 'ds' *
