Renaming a directory in Linux is easy and there are many ways to do it. From renaming a single directory to finding and renaming many, here’s how to do it.

Your data is safe

Renaming directories is something we all have to do from time to time.

We can create a directory and misspell its name, and we want to fix it. Often the purpose of a directory changes over time or over the life of a project, and you want to adjust the name to reflect its new use. Maybe you unzipped an archive file and it created a directory tree with the directory names in uppercase and you’d like them to be lowercase.

Whatever the reason. renaming a directory does nothing to the data it contains. It changes the path to this data, but the files and directories inside your renamed directory are not affected.

Do not rename system directories. Changing the path to system files and commands will have a detrimental effect on the operation of your computer, to say the least. If you must use sudo to rename a directory – unless you really know what you’re doing – chances are you shouldn’t rename it.

Using the mv command

In the simplest cases, all we really need is the mv ordered. This is an integral part of every Linux distribution, so there is nothing to install.

The mv command is over 50 years old at the time of writing. It comes from the dawn of Unix, when short, cryptic commands were all the rage, probably to reduce the number of characters that had to pass along slow serial lines from teletypes and dumb terminals to the real computer.

It actually means “move”, and it can be used to move files from one directory to another. If you move a file to the same location it’s already in and give it a new name, you’ve renamed the file. And we can do the same with directories.

There are two subdirectories in this directory.

ls

To rename a directory, we use the mv command. We need to provide the current directory name and the new name.

mv old-work archive-2

If the directory you want to rename is not in your current directory, provide the path and directory name.

mv ~/htg/old-work ~/htg/archive-2

ls

Using the File Browser

File browsers are able to rename directories. The keystroke in the GNOME Files application is F2. Highlighting a directory and pressing the F2 key opens the “Rename Folder” dialog.

Type in the new name and click the green “Rename” button.

The directory is renamed for you.

It’s that simple.

The rename command

If your needs are more complicated than just renaming a directory, you may need to use the rename ordered. This lets you use Perl expressions to rename files and directories. It provides an altogether more powerful and flexible way of renaming directories.

We will talk about the basics of Perl rename ordered. There is another older command called rename which is part of the basic utilities of Linux. You will probably need to install the Perl rename command we want to use.

To avoid name conflicts with the existing rename command, the Perl rename the command is called prename on Fedora, and perl-rename on Manjaro. On Ubuntu, the rename and prename The commands are both symbolic links that resolve to a binary called file-rename.

So on Manjaro the command you will need to use perl-renameand on Fedora it is prename . On Ubuntu you can use rename Where prename.

To install Perl rename, on Ubuntu you must type:

sudo apt install rename

On Fedora, the command is:

sudo dnf install prename

On Manjaro, the package is called perl-rename.

sudo pacman -Sy perl-rename

Be sure to use the appropriate command for your distribution if you want to work on the samples.

Get started with renaming

The rename The command takes Perl regular expressions and applies them to a file or directory, or a group of files or directories.

In our directory we have a collection of other directories.

ls

Their names are a mixture of lowercase, uppercase, and mixed case. We can convert them all to lowercase with an appropriate expression.

rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *

ls

All directories are now lowercase, whether they were all uppercase before, or contain the odd uppercase letter.

All the magic is contained in the expression. The expression is surrounded by single quotes “'“. That’s what the whole command means.

• there: it means to search for any character in the first character range and replace it with the corresponding character from the second character range.
• /AZ/az/: The first range consists of all the letters from “A” to “Z”, and the second of all the characters between “a” and “z”.
• *: The asterisk wildcard means apply this to all directories.

In other words, the command reads: “for all directories, replace all uppercase letters with the equivalent lowercase letter”.

Obviously you can rename a single directory with rename, even if that smacks of exaggeration. You will be faster using mv.

rename 's/gamma/epsilon-2/' *

ls

The “s” in this expression stands for substitute. It checks each directory to see if its name is “gamma”. If so, it replaces it with “epsilon-2”. Be aware though that this would also have matched a directory called “gamma-zeta”, for example, renaming it “epsilon-2-zeta”.

We can avoid this by adding the start of string “^” and end of string “$” metacharacters to the first proposition of the expression.

ls

rename 's/^gamma$/epsilon-2/' *

ls

This leaves the “epsilon-2” directory intact.

Using rename with other commands

We can use other commands to locate the directories we want rename work on. If we have a set of nested directories and we want to rename all those that end in “-old” so that they end in “-archive”, we can achieve this using find and xargs.

We must use xargs because rename does not accept piped inputs. The xargs The command overcomes this problem by accepting piped input and adding it to another command’s command line as a command line parameter.

Our command looks like this:

find . -depth -type d -name "*-old" | xargs -r rename "s/old$/archive/"

• .: We say find to start searching in the current directory. It could be any path, of course.
• -depth: Use a depth-first search. This means that the contents of deeper nested subdirectories are processed before higher subdirectories.
• -type d: Search for directories, not files.
• -name “*-old”: The search index. We are looking for directories whose names end in “-old”.
• |: We pipe the output of find to the xargs ordered.
• xargs-r: The -r (no execution if empty) means do not execute the command if there are no matching directories.
• rename “s/old$/archive/”: The rename command to execute.

Our directory tree looks like this before the command.

We launch our order:

And we can see that all the corresponding directories including the nested ones have been renamed.

race horses

Renaming a directory needs nothing more than mv. If you prefer GUI applications, you can use your file browser. If you have a lot of directories to rename, and especially if they’re scattered across a directory tree, you’ll need the flexibility of rename.

RELATED: How to Manage Files from Linux Terminal: 11 Commands You Need to Know