rename Command

The rename command renames multiple files at once using pattern matching — either Perl regular expressions (Perl rename) or simple string substitution (util-linux rename). It is far more powerful than manual mv commands when you need to rename dozens or hundreds of files following a pattern.

There are two common versions of rename on Linux: the Perl-based rename (also called prename or perl-rename, default on Debian/Ubuntu) which supports full Perl regular expressions, and the util-linux rename (default on RHEL/Fedora) which supports simple string substitution. This guide covers both.

Common use cases include changing file extensions, adding prefixes or suffixes, converting case, removing spaces, numbering files sequentially, and batch-renaming photos, logs, or data files. Combined with find, rename can process files recursively across directory trees.

Option	Description	Example
's/old/new/'	Perl rename: substitute old with new using regex	rename 's/\.txt$/.md/' *.txt
-n	Dry run - show what would be renamed without doing it	rename -n 's/\.txt$/.md/' *.txt
-v	Verbose - show each rename operation	rename -v 's/ /_/g' *.txt
-f	Force - overwrite existing files	rename -f 's/old/new/' *.txt
's/old/new/g'	Global - replace all occurrences (not just first)	rename 's/-/_/g' *.log
's/PATTERN/\L$&/'	Convert matching text to lowercase	rename 's/.*/\L$&/' *.TXT
's/PATTERN/\U$&/'	Convert matching text to uppercase	rename 's/.*/\U$&/' *.txt
OLD NEW FILES	Util-linux rename: simple string substitution	rename .txt .md *.txt