Mdthbs

To replace # by somethingelse for filenames in the current directory (not recursive) you can use the GNU rename utility:

rename  's/#/somethingelse/' *

Characters like - must be escaped with a .

For your case, you would want to use

rename 's/#U00a9/safe/g' *

Note that if you only want to operate on a certain selection of files, e.g., only *.jpg, adjust the final input to match that selection:

rename 's/#U00a9/safe/g' *.jpg

To perform a test before actually changing filenames, use the -n flag:

demo/> ls                               

Lucky-#U00a9NBC-125x125.jpg  

Lucky-#U00a9NBC-150x150.jpg 



demo/> rename -n 's/#U00a9/safe/g' *.jpg

rename(Lucky-#U00a9NBC-125x125.jpg, Lucky-safeNBC-125x125.jpg)

rename(Lucky-#U00a9NBC-150x150.jpg, Lucky-safeNBC-150x150.jpg)

For OS X, GNU rename can be installed using homebrew: brew install rename.

To escape # from the shell, just use single quotes ('#'), double quotes ("#"), or backslash (#).

The simplest in your case would be to use the rename command (if it is available):

rename '#U00a9' safe *.jpg

find the list of files and then replace keyword.
below is example

find . -name '*jpg' -exec bash -c ' mv $0 ${0/#U00a9NBC/safeNBC}' {} ;

not sure how to in sed, but you can try this in a bash shell:

for f in Lucky-#U00a9NBC-*.jpg; do mv -v "$f" "${f/#U00a9/safe}"; done;

explanation:

1. loops through all file names matching the glob (Lucky-#U00a9NBC-*.jpg)


2. renames file using the move command(mv)


3. uses native bash parameter substitution ${var/Pattern/Replacement} to craft the new name ("${f/#U00a9/safe}")

More on parameter substitution (which is highly underutilized IMO): http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/parameter-substitution.html

The above examples were not working on my system (CentOS 5.6) so I found a (possibly more system-specific) command that works (note: need to escape '#' with on command line):

rename #U00a9 safe *.jpg

[Also: I don't have enough reputation yet to comment, so in response to Nikhil's question regarding the use of /g in rename 's/old_string/new_string/g' (posed in the comments for another answer above):

Use the g modifier to perform a 'global' substitution (that is, to substitute new_string for old_string as many times as old_string occurs). This shouldn't be necessary in my answer because the rename will be applied to all files specified with *. See https://www.computerhope.com/unix/rename.htm for a concise explanation of this and other modifiers.]

Here's DTK's solution wrapped in reusable bash function:

function renameFilesRecursively () {



  SEARCH_PATH="$1"

  SEARCH="$2"

  REPLACE="$3"



  find ${SEARCH_PATH} -type f -name "*${SEARCH}*" | while read FILENAME ; do

      NEW_FILENAME="$(echo ${FILENAME} | sed -e "s/${SEARCH}/${REPLACE}/g")";

      mv "${FILENAME}" "${NEW_FILENAME}";

  done



}

Here's how you can use it:

renameFilesRecursively /home/user/my-files apple orange

Actually rename has an option exactly for that called --subst or -s in short. No need to use the regex syntax.

rename -s '#U00a9' 'safe' *

If you want to replace/substitute multi occurrences, use --subst-all or -S.

BTW, I only wanted to replace a string by nothing (remove it from file name)... well we also have an option for it -d/--delete and -D/--delete-all:

rename -d '#U00a9' *

Another option is to use pyRenamer, an application made specifically for batch renaming.

It can be installed with sudo apt-get install pyrenamer

For usage details, refer to its README file on GitHub.