edit-filenames

Renames or moves files (or directories) using a text editor.

Allows paths to a large number of files to be edited using features of a text editor, such as search-and-replace or multi-cursor editing.

The text editor to use will be determined from the VISUAL or EDITOR environment variables. The editor alternatively can be explicitly specified via the -e/--editor command-line option. The editor can be set to sed or to other similar tools to non-interactively edit filenames.

Note that tabbed editors typically will need to be passed additional command-line options to spawn independent instances. This is necessary for edit-filenames to determine when the edited file is closed. See the examples below.

Demo

Installation

edit-filenames depends on submodules, so --recurse-submodules is necessary when using git clone:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/jamesderlin/edit-filenames.git

Setting git config submodule.recurse true is also recommended so that submodules are automatically and appropriately updated when the parent repository is updated.

Examples

• To use Visual Studio Code (code) to rename all files in the current directory:

  export EDITOR="code --wait"
  edit-filenames ./*

• To use sed to replace "apples" with "bananas" for all filenames in the current directory:

  edit-filenames -e "sed -i s/apples/bananas/" ./*

• To add a .png extension to all files in the current directory that are identified as PNG images (and that don't already have a .png extension):

  file --mime-type ./* | grep image/png | grep --invert-match .png \
  | cut -d : -f 1 \
  | edit-filenames -e "sed -i s/$/.png/" -

Alternatives

• vidir from moreutils is a similar program that can rename files using the default editor. It additionally is capable of deleting files and directories.

• Instead of using sed, Perl includes a rename tool that can rename files using regular expressions.

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Copyright © 2020-2021 James D. Lin.