How to rename a group of files on Linux
For decades, Linux users have been renaming files with the mv command. It’s easy, and the command does just what you expect. Yet sometimes you need to rename a large group of files. When that is the case, the rename command can make the task a lot easier. It just requires a little finesse with regular expressions.
Unlike the mv command, rename isn’t going to allow you to simply specify the old and new names. Instead, it uses a regular expression like those you'd use with Perl. In the example below, the "s" specifies that we're substituting the second string (old) for the first, thus changing this.new to this.old.