Rename files incrementally in a specific directory?

Question

I have a directory containing bunch of .txt files , I need a command to rename these files by one command , so their name will be : file1.txt , file2.txt, file3.txt , etc .

Any Help ?

Solution 1

You can use this in terminal to rename files as you wished,

j=1;for i in *.txt; do mv "$i" file"$j".txt; let j=j+1;done

It will do the job.

Explanation:

• Set a counter j, initially set it to 1
• Initiate a for loop and use a shell glob *.txt to obtain all txt files.
• for each file rename it using mv and increase the counter by 1.

Solution 2

You can use the rename command, which is usually included in a default installation:

c=0 rename 's/.*/sprintf("file%05d.txt", ++$ENV{c})/e' *

Use the -n flag if you want to do a test first:

c=0 rename -n 's/.*/sprintf("file%05d.txt", ++$ENV{c})/e' *

The way this works is, for each argument, it executes the perl s/// expression, and performs the rename from the original to the replaced string. In the replacement string I use sprintf to format the name, where I use the environment variable c as the counter from 1.

In most cases you also may need leading "0" for each number, %05d does the trick, where 5 is number of digits.

Solution 3

The following command will also rename files incrementally :

cd (directory containing files )

Then run this script :

count=1
for i in *; do
    mv "${i}" file${count}.`echo "${i}" | awk -F. '{print $2}'`
    ((++count))

done 

Comments

[Stormvirux]

do you mind if it is a python script?

[nux]

the script should be executed in terminal , but you can write your script .

[Fakhri Zulkifli]

for i in *.txt; do echo mv "$i" "file${i#file}"; done

[nux]

can you explain your command ?

[sourav c.]

@nux see the edits and feel free to discuss if necessary.

[nux]

ok thank you ,i will consider it as a right answer , i found a small script that satisfy my needs too .

[Kostanos]

Great example, should be a top answer. With %05d instead of %d you can add leading 0 to the name, with 5 digits.