Renaming mulitple files linux

Question

I Have mulitple files like

test-20050231-description.jpg
test-20050301-description.jpg

and i wanted to rename them to the format

test-2005-02-31-description.jpg
test-2005-03-01-description.jpg

I tried the rename command for that but couldnt get a solution.

Would be great if someone could help me.

Answer 1

Using the Perl rename utility:

rename -n 's/(\d{4})(\d{2})(\d{2})/$1-$2-$3/' test-*-description.jpg

Remove -n if the output looks as expected.

Answer 2

assuming they are always in the same format you can do substring with loop:

cd /wanted/path/
for i in *.jpg; do mv "$i" "${i:0:9}-${i:9:2}-${i:11:2}${i:13}" ;done

Answer 3

What command did you type exactly as the rename command? AFAIK the best way to rename a file is to use the mv command. Have you tried:

mv test-20050231-description.jpg test-2005-02-31-description.jpg

Another possibility I can think of is that you may be moving files you don't have permission to move. If you own the machine you're working on you can try typing sudo before the mv command.