changing name of some files in bulk

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Rename all the files within a folder with prefix “Unix_”
how can I rename multiple files by inserting a character?

Is there a way to make a change in name of some files, for example to append name of each user to files that reside in his home folder that if they moved somewhere can find files of a particular user? I use CentOS 5.5

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

Yes:

$ for file in *; do owner=$(stat -c %U "$file"); mv "$file" "${owner}_${file}"; done

You should use stat -c %U filename because $USER expands to current user, not to a file's owner.

A file's owner could change from one argument to other, hence rename's based solutions might have to cope with /e modifier of substitution operator or be combined with some call to stat. That said, I don't consider this question an exact duplicate of question 13147 as the prefix would be dynamic.

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited May 18 '12 at 11:56

2

for f in * ; do mv "$f" $USER_"$f" ; done

edited May 18 '12 at 11:56

George M

13,959

answered May 18 '12 at 09:44

Mahesh

123

1

exact duplicate from http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/13149/18275 – Jameelopix May 18 '12 at 10:51
yes, it is. helps to have an answer here for lazy ones. marking CW. – Mahesh May 18 '12 at 17:16

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 18 '12 at 11:56

0

for f in * ; do mv "$f" "$f"_$USER ; done

edited May 18 '12 at 11:56

George M

13,959

answered May 18 '12 at 10:50

user unknown

10,482

2

exact duplicate from http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/13149/18275 – Jameelopix May 18 '12 at 10:51

changing name of some files in bulk

3 Answers3