Batch file renaming is a common job for a developer. In the past, I’ve used a Mac application called NameMangler or Finder itself to do the heavy lifting for me. Those tools work well when the files being transformed live within the same directory, but it quickly becomes more difficult when you want to be able to work across multiple, potentially nested directory structures.
On the past few occasions, I’ve used Bash to great effect, though for some reason I NEVER REMEMBER how to correctly pipe the file transformation on to the find command, so I’m documenting it here for future reference.
Below is an example of a task that I had to carry out just the other day – renaming all files with the .textile extension to .md. It really is trivial.
find . -type f -name '*.textile' | while read f; do mv "$f" "${f/.textile/.md}"; done