Rename multiple files based on pattern in Unix

There are multiple files in a directory that begin with prefix fgh, for example:

fghfilea
fghfileb
fghfilec

I want to rename all of them to begin with prefix jkl. Is there a single command to do that instead of renaming each file individually?

There are several ways, but using rename will probably be the easiest.

Using one version of rename:

rename 's/^fgh/jkl/' fgh*

Using another version of rename (same as Judy2K's answer):

rename fgh jkl fgh*

You should check your platform's man page to see which of the above applies.

This is how sed and mv can be used together to do rename:

for f in fgh*; do mv "$f" $(echo "$f" | sed 's/^fgh/jkl/g'); done

As per comment below, if the file names have spaces in them, quotes may need to surround the sub-function that returns the name to move the files to:

for f in fgh*; do mv "$f" "$(echo $f | sed 's/^fgh/jkl/g')"; done