27

I have a number of tiff files named: 

sw.001.tif
sw.002.tif
...

and I want to remove the .tif at the end of each of the files. How can I use the rename command to do this?

Stéphane Gimenez
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Paul
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    Bear in mind that NO linux or unix filesystem uses Windows or VMS-style "extensions" - it is only by convention that a suffix of the file name is ".tif" or ".c" or ".o" or ".so" or whatever. –  Mar 19 '12 at 23:07
  • That's fine... I'm importing files from windows to linux :) – Paul Mar 19 '12 at 23:14
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    Technically speaking Windows doesn't use file extensions either, it's just that Windows 95's file manager kept using the last characters of the filename to determine file type after breaking out of the MS-DOS naming scheme and the convention has since remained. – RAKK Feb 20 '15 at 19:04

7 Answers7

35

perl's rename (as typically found on Debian where it's also called prename), or this derivative (rename package on Debian):

rename 's/\.tif$//' *.tif

util-linux rename (as typically found on Red Hat, rename.ul on Debian):

rename -- .tif '' *.tif

(note that that one would rename blah.tiffany.tif to blahfany.tif)

Stéphane Chazelas
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Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
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    I believe the "Debian" rename is by Larry Wall (comes with Perl?) and "Red Hat" one is from util-linux (rename.ul in Debian IIRC). – XTL Mar 20 '12 at 14:19
  • @XTL: True. I just call them that because they're the "rename" programs found in Debian or Red Hat derivatives. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Mar 20 '12 at 14:39
  • Thanks so much! I never realized that there were different versions of 'rename'. I assume there are other subtle differences between the commands in debian & redhat. I'll have to lookup some of their differences. – Paul Mar 20 '12 at 14:45
  • The second command resulted invalid syntax, but first one worked. – ABCD Mar 02 '20 at 05:54
16

For a non-rename, you might do:

$ for i in *.tif; do mv -i $i `basename $i .tif`; done

(-i to warn against replacing a file)

XTL
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    Safer faster version: `for i in ./*.tif; do mv -i "$i" "${i%.tif}"; done` – jw013 Mar 20 '12 at 14:13
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    @jw013 your comment should be a top-level answer. – Roland Jan 23 '20 at 07:31
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    @jw013 Why `./*.tif` instead of `*.tif`? – Pedro A Jul 04 '21 at 18:03
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    @PedroA `./` is a pretty safe prefix to prevent file names from being misinterpreted, for example a file beginning with `-` may be interpreted as option. [Example](https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/1519/9537) – jw013 Jul 05 '21 at 13:50
  • I went with the anwer from jw013, though I wanted to skip warnings for replacing (as that was my intention) so I've switched `-i` to `-f` (CentOS 6) to force overwrite. – LuxZg Jun 05 '23 at 09:22
3

If you use IBM AIX you won't have a rename command, so in order to batch remove file extensions you'll have to use plain vanilla System V UNIX commands:

for file in *.tif; do
   mv $file `echo $file | sed 's/.tif$//'`;
done;
RAKK
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3
rename -- .oldext .newext *.oldext

This substitutes the old extension with the new one. To simply remove the extension you can explicitly pass in an empty string as an argument.

rename -- .gz.tmp  '' *.gz.tmp

With the above command all files with .gz.tmp extension in the current folder will be renamed to filename.gz.

Refer to the article : Linux: remove file extensions for multiple files for details.

Stéphane Chazelas
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Manpreet Singh
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    That assumes the util-linux implementation of `rename` which is incompatible with (and much more limited than) the traditional `rename` command from `perl`. – Stéphane Chazelas May 27 '15 at 09:49
  • Also note that it replaces the _first_ occurrence of `.oldext` within the file name, not necessarily the extension (`foo.oldextasy.oldext` would be renamed to `footasy.oldext`). – Stéphane Chazelas May 27 '15 at 09:50
1
perl-rename 's/\.tif//' *.tif

Use -n for dry run.

αғsнιη
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cree cree
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0

A non rename method.

ls | grep .tif | xargs -I % sh -c 'mv % $(basename % .tif)'
Hanzhou Tang
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-2

can we make this recursive 

for i in *.gz; do mv -i $i `basename $i .gz`; done
user3361573
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