Batch replace substring with another in filenames

Question

I have a bunch of files named similar to this:

1_1.pngEND1_1.png

How would you replace .pngEND with _?

I've googled this problem and tried literally 5+ solutions, non of which worked on mac.

Answer 1

There are tons of ways to do this, for instance

for i in *pngEND*.png; do [[ -e ${i/.pngEND/_} ]] || echo mv "$i" "${i/.pngEND/_}"; done

Remove the echo if the output looks sensible.

Answer 2

Unless you need a solution you can use in a script, you can do this directly in Finder.

• Select the files you want to rename
• Right click one of them, and choose Rename N Items... (where N is the number of selected files)
• Choose the Replace Text option in the dropdown
• Enter the text you want to replace (".pngEND") and the text you want to replace it with ("_")
• Click Rename

Answer 3

If your not familier with terminal or scripts, you can use the mac app called NameChanger (free to use). You can change almost everything in batch on filenames / file extentions.

Answer 4

If I had to do this, I'd use rename command available for install via HomeBrew.

Example:

Setup:

mac:test user$ touch 1_1.pngEND1_1.png

mac:test user$ ls
1_1.pngEND1_1.png

Run rename command:

mac:test user$ rename 's/\.pngEND/_/' *.pngEND*

Result:

mac:test user$ ls
1_1_1_1.png

Answer 5

I've also used the perl rename tool to some success. It also has a dry run option so you can test before you execute the changes.