CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashmacos
user316478
user316478

Reputation: 59

Rename files with incrementing number starting at certain number

I have some files:

$ ls
00000.ABC
00001.ABC
00002.ABC
00003.ABC
00004.ABC
00005.ABC

I want to change these to start at a certain number, for example 00055.ABC so the new files look like:

$ ls
00055.ABC
00056.ABC
00057.ABC
00058.ABC
00059.ABC
00060.ABC

I understand about for loops to loop through each file, for example for file in ls { } but I'm not sure about the incrementing number starting at a certain number so appreciate any help.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2933

Answers (2)

joanis
joanis

Reputation: 12203

This should work:

for f in *.ABC; do
   num=$(basename "$f" .ABC)
   num2=$(printf "%05d" $((num + 55)))
   echo mv "$f" "$num2.ABC"
done

Notes:

  • I am assuming your files all follow the pattern of digits followed by .ABC, so that basename $f .ABC extracts the number. You'll have to adjust the num= line if this assumption does not hold.

  • $(( ... )) is the bash syntax to do arithmetic operations.

  • (printf "%05d" ...) is here to pad zeroes in front of the number, otherwise you'd just get 55 etc.

  • Remove the echo once you're convinced it's doing the right thing.

  • EDIT Warning: the new set of filenames should not overlap the old set of filenames, or you might lose some files. Carefully choosing the order the mv commands are run could solve the issue, but putting the files in a new directory as they are renamed and moving them back after would be much simpler.

EDIT:

@MarkSetchell pointed out in the comments that you want sequential numbering that is not based on the original file names, in which case this loop would work instead:

i=55 # choose your starting destination file number here
for f in *.ABC; do
   dest=$(printf "%05d" $i).ABC
   echo mv "$f" "$dest"
   i=$((i + 1))
done

Upvotes: 1

Mark Setchell
Mark Setchell

Reputation: 207375

You can do this easily with rename, which is actually just a Perl script, and which can be installed on macOS with homebrew using:

brew install rename

The command would then be:

rename --dry-run  -XN "00055" -e '$_ = $N' *ABC

Sample Output

'00001.ABC' would be renamed to '00055.ABC'
'00002.ABC' would be renamed to '00056.ABC'
'00003.ABC' would be renamed to '00057.ABC'
'00004.ABC' would be renamed to '00058.ABC'
'00005.ABC' would be renamed to '00059.ABC'

If that looks correct, you would remove the --dry-run and do it again. Using rename has the benefit that it will not clobber (overwrite) files and it will tell you what it is going to do, without actually changing anything, if you use the --dry-run option. It is also immensely powerful - it can do lowercase, camelcase, uppercase, remove control characters, call any Perl module and calculate any expression or substitution you can think of.

Upvotes: 2

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