[ILUG] global rename

[David O'Callaghan]

Hi Paul,

On 23/06/05 17:17, Paul Biggar wrote:
> I have a large directory containing code, data, scripts and documents,
> all ASCII. I want to do a global rename, that is for every instance of
> foo, I want it replaced with bar, whether its in a file name or inside
> a file, or anywhere, in fact.
> =

> Does a utility to do this exist? Or should I just script it?

On my Fedora Core 3 system I have a utility called "rename" from the =

util-linux package. From the man page:


  rename  will  rename the specified files by replacing the first occur-
  rence of from in their name by to.

  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.

Kind regards,

David