Rename bulk files with given name, in directory and subfolders using PowerShell

Question

I'm looking for a solution to rename all files with given name in the directory and subfolders.

Eg There is a directory called c:\\blah and in this folder, there is one file called BaR.txt and one folder called foo. In the foo folder, there is another file called bAr.txt . I want to find all files with name bar.txt and change the name of each file to “neo.txt”. It must also be possible to rename the files to lower case as well eg bar.txt . So far, I've tried to do this manually using the Windows Explorer in Windows10 but for some weird reason when I try to rename the bulk files there is extra “(1)” sign added to the end of each file name. I've tried to play with PowerShell and I created a command

$_.name -replace 'bar.txt','neo.txt'  

But it didn't work for me.

Answer 1

To do this, you need 2 cmdlets: Get-ChildItem and Rename-Item .

This should work:

Get-ChildItem -Path 'C:\Blah' -Filter 'bar.txt' -Recurse | ForEach-Object {
    Rename-Item -Path $_.FullName -NewName 'neo.txt'
}

However, if inside the foo folder there are more subfolders, this code will rename all files called bar.txt (case-insensitive) it finds in all of these subfolders.

If you do not want to go any deeper than the first subfolder in C:\\Blah (the one called foo ), you can use the -Depth parameter on the command like this:

Get-ChildItem -Path 'C:\Blah' -Filter 'bar.txt' -Recurse -Depth 1 | ForEach-Object {
    Rename-Item -Path $_.FullName -NewName 'neo.txt'
}