Can someone please tell me how I can rename a bunch of files at a time. I hava a directory that has 700+ files that are named
*.xyz and I would like to rename them to *.abc . How can I do that with a simple command ?

mv *.xyz *.abc did not work.

Thanks in advance

There are a lot of ways, for example you can try with:

cd /<your_directory>

for myfile in *.xyz
do
file_name=`echo $myfile |awk '{print substr($1,1,length($1)-4)}'`
echo "mv $file_name.xyz $file_name.abc"
done



Note: when you are sure remove the echo and the quotes.
from: echo "mv $file_name.xyz $file_name.abc"
to: mv $file_name.xyz $file_name.abc


Regards. Hugo

why all the substr biz?

why not just: file_name=`echo $myfile|awk -F. '{ print $1 }'`

or even

for i in `ls *.xyz`;do
mv $i $i.abc
done

That would rename file.xyz to file.xyz.abc which is (probably) not what we want here.

I use ksh (I may have mentioned that before). In ksh, you can use ${i%.*} to strip off the the file suffix.

So if ksh is your interactive shell, this command line will do it:
for i in *.xyz ; do mv $i ${i%.*}.abc ; done

Many thanks to all.