Wicked Cool Perl Scripts

#21 Mass File Renaming

The standard Unix/Linux rename command allows you to change the name of only one file at a time. (You can move multiple files from one directory to another but only really rename one.) If you want to rename multiple files at one time, you'll need a Perl script.

The Code

 1 #!/usr/bin/perl 2 use strict; 3 use warnings; 4 5 use Getopt::Std; 6 use vars qw/$opt_n $opt_v $opt_e/; 7 8 if (not getopts("nve:")) { 9 die("Bad options"); 10 } 11 if (not defined($opt_e)) { 12 die("Required option -e missing"); 13 } 14 15 foreach my $file_name (@ARGV) 16 { 17 # Compute the new name 18 my $new_name = $file_name; 19 20 # Perform the substitution 21 eval "\$new_name =~ s$opt_e"; 22 23 # Make sure the names are different 24 if ($file_name ...