Change multiple filenames by replacing a character

I have multiple files named like that : screenshot 13:25.png
Windows struggle to open these files probably because of the ":".

How can I replace it?

Solution 1:

In a terminal, cd into the right directory and then run this.

rename 's/\:/-/g' *.png -vn

This will preview the renaming. It should replace : with -.

If that looks right, remove the n from the end and then it will do the actual renaming.

Note: Ubuntu versions above 17.04 don't ship with rename, but it's still available in the default repositories, so use sudo apt install rename to obtain it

Solution 2:

Here's a pure bash solution:

for i in *:*; do
    mv -- "$i" "${i//:/_}"
done

The ${var//pattern/replacement} format will replace all occurrences of pattern with replacement in the variable $var. For more information on bash's string maipulation capabilities, see here.

If you want to do this for multiple characters, you could simply place them in a character class. So, for example, to replace all of ;,:,=,+,%,, with underscores, you could do:

$ ls 
1foo:bar  2foo:bar:baz  3foo;bar  4foo=bar  5foo%bar  6foo,bar  7foo+bar
$ for i in *; do mv -- "$i" "${i//[:;=%,+]/_}"; done
$ ls
1foo_bar  2foo_bar_baz  3foo_bar  4foo_bar  5foo_bar  6foo_bar  7foo_bar

Basically, the idea is that [ ] means any of the characters listed. So, by placing all of the characters you want to replace in the character class, all of them are dealt with at once.

The -- after mv signifies the end of options and is needed so that this will work even for file names beginning with - which otherwise would have been treated as options passed to mv.

For the specific characters you asked for, things are a bit more complex because some of them need to be escaped (I am ignoring the / since *nix doesn't allow it in file names any more than Windows does so that won't be an issue):

$ ls
1foo<bar  2foo>bar  3foo:bar  4foo\bar  5foo|bar  6foo*bar  7foo?bar  8foo"bar  9foo'bar
$ for i in *; do mv -- "$i" "${i//[<>:\\|*\'\"?]/_}"; done
$ ls
1foo_bar  2foo_bar  3foo_bar  4foo_bar  5foo_bar  6foo_bar  7foo_bar  8foo_bar  9foo_bar

Note that I escaped the \,' and " by adding a \ in front of each.

Solution 3:

If you prefer a GUI, install pyrenamer:

sudo apt-get install pyrenamer

Then run it:

pyrenamer

It has dozens of options for patterns and renaming formats.

Solution 4:

I prefer GUI but as a Nautilus Extension, i.e. Nautilus Actions Extra:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nae-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nautilus-actions-extra
nautilus -q

(See www.webupd8.org/2011/12/nautilus-actions-extra-pack-of-useful.html)

Then when you select files to be renamed and click Rename from the context menu, you are offered many options for renaming files.