Linux Basics - Rename Files

Oh god this was depressing. Say you have a bunch of .jpeg files you want to make into .jpg files. A filemanager on its own is pretty useless for this in either windows or linux. You may now decide to use a bulk rename utility. If you do this, you will be immediately sent in-fucking-sane by a user interface looking like this.

The second option, if you wish to preserve your grip on reality, is to use the command line. In windows the command to rename all .jpeg files to .jpg looks like this:

rename *.jpeg *.jpg

The '*' is a wildcard standing for any filename. So far, so good. The linux version of the command looks like this:

rename -v 's/\.jpeg$/\.jpg/' *.jpeg

I will accept that this is less mind meltingly unintuitive then the hideous UI cited above, but it is a close run thing.

Oh, and another thing. Apparently the usual way to rename files in Linux is to [m]o[v]e them like this:

mv oldfilename newfilename

If you realise that [c]o[p]y is cp, [m]o[v]e is mv, then you may think that [r]ena[m]e is rm. That would be a bad thing, because rm is actually [r]e[m]ove. Apparently no-one thinks this is all utterly bizarre.