Rename files recursively

Question

I want to recursively remove a substring from all files. I'm trying with the following command but it doesn't work:

❯ find . -name 'foobar*' -exec rename -vn 's/foobar//g' {} \;
rename: not enough arguments
Try 'rename --help' for more information.

I've added the options v and n to print instead of making changes.

I've also tried without the find part with no luck:

rename -nv "foobar" "" *
rename: invalid option -- ' '
Try 'rename --help' for more information.

The rename that I'm using says that it's part of the util-linux package.

I believe this is happening because there are files in the folder that start with a hypen.

Answer 1

You don't have to use rename. This can be done with mv also

for f in *foo* ; do mv $f ${f/foo/bar} ; done

${string/foo/bar} replaces first match of 'foo' with 'bar'. ${string//foo/bar} replaces all matches. Read here String Replacement for a complete explanation.

Alternately:

find . -type f -name '*foo*' | while read FILE ; do
    newname="$(echo ${FILE} | sed -e 's/foo/bar/g')" ;
    mv "${FILE}" "${newname}" ;
done

Answer 2

Is rename this rename (the Perl command line tool)? I use it too for renaming files. The string argument that you are supplying is a Perl expression and follows Perl rules.
This will rename all files in the folder, by replacing "foo" with "bar"

rename 's/foo/bar/' *

or with find

find . -type f -exec rename 's/foo/bar/' {} \;

For the other "rename" (util-linux) the syntax is

rename from to files...

without expressions, just plain string matching I believe.

Comments

I don't know how to check if they are the same. The documentation is different so I guess they are not the same. If I install that rename will it overwrite the current rename? And do I want to do that or is it better to give each a different name? If so how?

I've installed it and it gets installed with a different name. So I've tried it with:

find . -type f -name 'foo*' -exec renamexm --yes -tv 's/foo/bar/g' {} \;

but it doesn't print the change so I don't know if it's working.

---

On Arch the package (and the binary) is called "perl-rename". The other "rename" is another thing and uses its own rules for matching files. The package manager will deal with any conflicts you don't need to rename anything.