Linux: rename file but keep extension?

In Windows/DOS, I can say rename myfile.* yourfile.* to change the name but keep the extension. How is that accomplished on Linux?

The man page only suggests how to change the extension, but that's the opposite of what I want.

Bonus:
I actually want to put a photo's creation date into its filename, to get something like 20091231 2359 New Year.jpg. I'm afraid that I need some non-trivial combination of commands to achieve that?

Solution 1:

Here's an answer for the bonus question.

I actually want to put a photo's creation date into its filename, to get something like 20091231 2359 New Year.jpg. I'm afraid that I need some non-trivial combination of commands to achieve that?

Assuming you want to take the photo's creation date from the EXIF data, you'll need a separate tool for that. Luckily it turns out that jhead offers a trivial way to do exactly what you want, with its -n option.

$ jhead -h
 [...]

 -n[format-string]

             Rename files according to date.  Uses exif date if present, file
             date otherwise.  If the optional format-string is not supplied,
             the format is mmdd-hhmmss.  If a format-string is given, it is
             is passed to the 'strftime' function for formatting
             In addition to strftime format codes:
             '%f' as part of the string will include the original file name
             [...]

Here's an example:

$ jhead -n%Y-%m-%d-%f New_year.jpg   
New_year.jpg --> 2009-12-31-New_year.jpg

Edit: Of course, to do this for a bunch of photos, it'd be something like:

$ for i in *jpg; do jhead -n%Y-%m-%d-%f $i; done

To tweak the date formatting to your liking, take a look at the output of date --help, for example; it will list the available format codes.

(jhead is widely available for different systems. If you are e.g. on Ubuntu or Debian, simply type sudo apt-get install jhead to install it.)

Solution 2:

For just the renaming part, the 'rename' program will work. It's the same as the example you saw in the man page, just switched around.

justin@eee:/tmp/q$ touch myfile.{a,b,c,d}
justin@eee:/tmp/q$ ls
myfile.a  myfile.b  myfile.c  myfile.d
justin@eee:/tmp/q$ rename -v s/myfile/yourfile/ myfile.*
myfile.a renamed as yourfile.a
myfile.b renamed as yourfile.b
myfile.c renamed as yourfile.c
myfile.d renamed as yourfile.d
justin@eee:/tmp/q$ ls
yourfile.a  yourfile.b  yourfile.c  yourfile.d
justin@eee:/tmp/q$