Folder (with contents) renamer. Is there such a thing?

General system Applications
1

I have data that consists of 980 folders with 7342 files, and need to rename all of the folders. All folders have several characters, (position 1 - 7), that I need to remove. I do have a bulk file renamer, but it will not let me select folders; only it s contents. Is there an app, or maybe a cli way that will accomplish this?

Edit: After looking closer I see that the number of characters I need to remove varies a bit. The one thing all folders have in common though is a “-” char after the ones I need to remove. I only know BASIC programming language. I can almost imagine running the folder names through a For loop containing an “instring” function. I could probably do it on a TI calculator, but not in Linux. Any help would be most excellent.

2

zsh contains functionality for renaming called zmv, it can rename virtually anything in whatever way you want via extended globbing.

3

It sounds like that would work. Pattern matching is exactly what I need as all folder names have a standard prefix. I need to install the zsh shell to use zmv right?

4

I like it :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

zsh
zsh827×615 48.3 KB

5

Yes.

You need to also add this to your ~/.zshrc

autoload -U zmv
6

The renamer of Thunar can rename folders.