If you are even remotely familiar with regex, you would understand that s/ /_/g is searching for space and replacing all occurrences of space with _.

To replace the spaces with underscores in the names of all the files in the current directory, all you have to do is to use renam command in this way: rename 's/ /_/g' * The rename command will be pretty handy here. Naturally, you would want to remove the spaces and replace them with an underscore (_). This is why no experienced user ever names a file with spaces in it. It’s a nightmare to handle spaces in filenames in Linux. Imagine if you have white spaces in several filenames. Scenario 1: Replace a Character With Another in all the Filenames in Linux Let me show two practical scenarios where this command will save you a lot of time. Now you must be wondering how to rename files with the rename command. If you are a sudo user in Ubuntu or Debian, you can use this command to install rename: sudo apt install rename -s : Do not rename the symlink but its targetĭo note that rename command is not a standard utility that are pre-installed on the Linux distributions like mv or cp command.Show the files that would be renamed but don’t rename the files. This 'rename command' has the following options: This is the syntax rename command follows: rename perlexpr The rename command only works on the filename, not the file itself. There is a command line utility called rename that allows you to rename all the files that match a certain pattern in Perl regex form. But let me tell you an even simpler way of renaming files based on regex pattern. You can use the find exec command option with mv command to automate this process. Using mv command one by one would take plenty of time and should surely be avoided. That’s the standard way after all.īut what about the situation where you have to rename several files. You simply use it in the format: mv old_file_name new_file_name I believe you already know how to rename files in Linux with mv command.

How to rename files on mac linux