Upgraders, please read the release notes

renamer

Renamer is a command-line utility to help rename files and folders. It is flexible and extensible via plugins.

Disclaimer

Always run this tool with the --dry-run option until you are confident the results look correct.

Synopsis

The examples below use double quotes to suit Windows users. MacOS & Linux users should use single quotes.

As input, renamer takes a list of filenames or glob patterns plus some options describing how you would like the files to be renamed.

$ renamer [options] [file...]

This trivial example will replace the text jpeg with jpg in all file and directory names in the current directory.

$ renamer --find jpeg --replace jpg *

As above but operates on all files and folders recursively.

$ renamer --find jpeg --replace jpg "**"

If no filenames or patterns are specified, renamer will look for a newline-separated list of filenames on standard input. This approach is useful for crafting a specific input list using tools like find. This example operates on files modified less than 20 minutes ago.

$ find . -mtime -20m | renamer --find jpeg --replace jpg

Same again but with a hand-rolled input of filenames and glob patterns. Create an input text file, e.g. files.txt:

house.jpeg
garden.jpeg
img/*

Then pipe it into renamer.

$ cat files.txt | renamer --find jpeg --replace jpg

Simple example using a regular expression literal. The case-insensitive pattern /one/i matches the input file ONE.jpg, renaming it to two.jpg.

$ renamer --find "/one/i" --replace "two" ONE.jpg

Plugins

If the built-in behaviour doesn't fit your needs, take a look through the list of available plugins.

If you can't find an appropriate plugin you can write your own. For example, this trivial plugin appends the extension .jpg to every input file. Save it as my-plugin.js.

module.exports = PluginBase => class Jpg extends PluginBase {
  replace (filePath) {
    return filePath + '.jpg'
  }
}

Use your custom replace plugin by supplying its filename to the --plugin option.

$ renamer --plugin my-plugin.js images/*

Further reading

Please see the wiki for

• Usage examples.
• More information about using plugins and writing plugins.
• The full list of command-line options.

For more information on Regular Expressions, see this useful guide.

Install

$ npm install -g renamer

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© 2012-20 Lloyd Brookes <75pound@gmail.com>.

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