edit-filenames

Renames or moves files (or directories) using a text editor.

Allows paths to a large number of files to be edited using features of a text editor, such as search-and-replace or multi-cursor editing.

The text editor to use will be determined from the VISUAL or EDITOR environment variables. The editor alternatively can be explicitly specified via the -e/--editor command-line option. The editor can be set to sed or to other similar tools to non-interactively edit filenames.

Note that tabbed editors typically will need to be passed additional command-line options to spawn independent instances. This is necessary for edit-filenames to determine when the edited file is closed. See the examples below.

Demo

Installation

edit-filenames depends on submodules, so --recurse-submodules is necessary when using git clone:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/jamesderlin/edit-filenames.git

Setting git config submodule.recurse true is also recommended so that submodules are automatically and appropriately updated when the parent repository is updated.

Examples

To use Visual Studio Code (code) to rename all files in the current directory:
```
export EDITOR="code --wait"
edit-filenames ./*
```
To use sed to replace "apples" with "bananas" for all filenames in the current directory:
```
edit-filenames -e "sed -i s/apples/bananas/" ./*
```
To add a .png extension to all files in the current directory that are identified as PNG images (and that don't already have a .png extension):
```
file --mime-type ./* | grep image/png | grep --invert-match .png \
| cut -d : -f 1 \
| edit-filenames -e "sed -i s/$/.png/" -
```

Alternatives

vidir from moreutils is a similar program that can rename files using the default editor. It additionally is capable of deleting files and directories.
Instead of using sed, Perl includes a rename tool that can rename files using regular expressions.