How to rename multiple files at once?

Question

I want to rename multiple files at once. For example:

Picture1.jpg
Picture2.jpg
Picture3.jpg
Picture4.jpg

into

Vacation-Picture1.jpg
Vacation-Picture2.jpg
Vacation-Picture3.jpg
Vacation-Picture4.jpg

I am quite familiar with the terminal, if there is no app which is quite good in renaming files.

Answer 1

Try something like

 for file in Picture*.jpg
 do
    mv $file "vacation-$file"
 done  

What that does is uses the variable file for each entry matching Picture*.jpg. Then it takes the file or folder and moves it to be prefixed with "vacation".

Hope that helps

Answer 2

I like user933531's answer, but if you'd like a GUI, the A Better Finder Rename app is really good. I got it from the App Store.

Answer 3

While not a Terminal solution, I like Forklift for this purpose (and for many others). From their website:

Answer 4

If you prefer a more flexible solution and are able to work with regular expressions this little perl script is very helpful:

#!/usr/bin/perl
# rename - Larry's filename fixer
# Usage: rename perlexpr [files]

($op = shift) || die "Usage: rename perlexpr [filenames]\n";

chomp(@ARGV = <STDIN>) unless @ARGV;

for (@ARGV) {
    $was = $_;
    eval $op;
    die $@ if $@;
    rename($was,$_) unless $was eq $_;
}