Bulk Rename Utility Tool
Giancarlo Stewart
In this demo, all instances of the file name "foo" are replaced with "foobar". Since all of the files are uniquely named, this would have taken a long time to complete manually one-by-one. PowerRename enables a single bulk rename. Notice that the Explorer's "Undo Rename" (Ctrl+Z) command makes it possible to undo the last change.
After selecting files in Windows File Explorer, right-click and select Rename with PowerRename (which will appear only if enabled in PowerToys). The selected items will be displayed, along with search and replace values, a list of options, and a preview pane displaying results of the search and replace values entered.
If selected, the Search value will be interpreted as a regular expression (regex). The Replace value can also contain regex variables (see examples below). If cleared, the Search value will be interpreted as plain text to be replaced with the text in the Replace field.
The creation date and time attributes of a file can be used in the Replace with text by entering a variable pattern according to the table below. Selecting the tool-tip in the Replace with field allows you to view and select from the supported patterns.
Regular Expressions define a search pattern for text. They can be used to search, edit and manipulate text. The pattern defined by the regular expression may match once, several times, or not at all for a given string. PowerRename uses the ECMAScript grammar, which is common amongst modern programming languages.
To use the Boost library instead of the standard library, select the Use Boost library option in the PowerToys settings. It enables extended features, like lookbehind, which are not supported by the standard library.
This utility is part of the Microsoft PowerToys utilities for power users. It provides a set of useful utilities to tune and streamline your Windows experience for greater productivity. To install PowerToys, see Installing PowerToys.
Bulk Rename Utility: file renaming software for Windows. Bulk Rename Utility is free of charge for personal, private use, at home. To use Bulk Rename Utility within a business entity, company or for commercial purposes, a commercial license is required.
Bulk Rename Utility is an easy to use file rename program (a.k.a. file renamer). Renaming multiple files and/or multiple folders has never been easier! It has a small memory footprint so it can be left running all the time without consuming all your memory. It started as a freeware Visual Basic tool, but as its popularity has grown it has been completely rewritten in C++ to be robust and lightweight - and very, very fast! It can easily handle folders/discs containing well over 100,000 entries... and it can batch rename 1,000s of files in seconds.
The software gets downloaded very frequently. It has a large base of regular users and an active User's Forum. Most of the features have originated from users' suggestions. As such, it is continually being enhanced and improved.
With ViceVersa PRO you can copy efficiently multiple files between folders, disks, computers. Copy thousands of digital photos, documents and files that you need to backup or mirror to an external media (e.g. USB Drive, NAS), another hard-disk, or another computer (desktop, server, workstations over LAN, VPN).
The copy can be performed on-demand (i.e. as requested by the user), scheduled (e.g. every X hours or at an established time during the day), event-driven (e.g. when connected to the network or when a USB drive is inserted) or even in real-time (i.e. as soon as changes to files are detected). Learn more about real-time functionality
ViceVersa PRO will automatically only copy files that are new or have changed since the last time it run: so you can have an always up-to-date, exact replica of all your important files, file by file and folder by folder. It couldn't be easier!
Are you looking for a simple way to backup your files to Amazon S3? Try S3Express S3 Command Line Utility for Windows. Easily upload, query, backup files and folders to Amazon S3 storage, based upon multiple flexible criteria. Quickly upload only new or changed file using multipart uploads and concurrent threads. Create custom batch scripts, list Amazon S3 files or entire folders, filter them with conditions, query, change object metadata and ACLs and much more. Free 21-day trial available.
I have only spent 5 months with Ubuntu and it has been an awesome experience, I hardly boot into Windows now, but there are some things I miss, like the Bulk Rename Utility I used to have in Windows.
There is the Bulk Rename utility, which is part of Thunar, the default file manager of XFCE desktop environment (the one used by Xubuntu). Selecting multiple files in Thunar and selecting "rename" opens the tool, but it can also be started separately.
If you prefer to use a different file manager, you may still use this tool. It cannot be installed separately from Thunar but the latter brings very few specific dependencies and can be installed easily. The tool can be started separately though, and can even be integrated as a custom menu action in other files managers like Dolphin and Nautilus.
This tool seem less intuitive and complicated for simple operations. (A great advantage of the Bulk Rename tool in Thunar is the ability of having a list of files outside the file manager that can be modified easily by drag&drop.)
You are supposed to first select the "Picker" tab. But by default all files and folders (of the selected path) are selected and, if you do not want to rename them all, you have to un-select them all by clicking "none" and then select them one by one with single-left-click. (I find this annoying, and prefer to put all files that need renaming in a separate folder, and then select the "Picker" tab. - As far as I can tell, that would be the way to go for the Windows tool mentioned in the question either, as its behavior is similar.)
Bulk rename utility does work with linux via wine. But it get hangs on certain operations. We will get used to it and we will automatically skip doing such operations after familiarizing them. I am very satisfied with it.
The first line outputs the list of files into a file called fileList.txt. The second line separates each of the names in the list into 3 parts, the #, the "-" and the rest of the name. For each of those it does the rename command.
I use Total Commander's multi-rename tool (ctrl+M) for things like this. Their useful tool, one of too many to count, is easy to use, and can also employ regular expressions and templates if necessary. Oh, and it obviously gives you a preview before making any changes.
I personally don't care for the "Bulk Rename" app. As others have mentioned, the GUI is atrocious and not very intuitive. With a little research and simple coding, these things can be done much mroe efficiently and quickly.
I use Blackboard to administer courses in a University. When I download an assignment in mass (in Blackboard, click top of grading column, then "assignment file download" Blackboard adds a bunch of extra stuff to the file name -often making the file name too long to be valid on Windows.
I have developed a hybrid JScript/batch command line utility called JREN.BAT that can rename files or folders by performing a regular expression search and replace on the names. It is pure script that will run natively on any Windows machine from XP forward. Full documentation is embedded within the script.
If you need serious power and are willing to shell out the money... PowerGrep is one of the most powerful and versatile tools on the market... you can rename almost anything with PowerGrep... even binary search and replace... it's created by RegEx Guru, Jan Goyvaerts.
I really like qmv from the renameutils package. It enables you to use your favorite (terminal based) text editor to rename files. I prefer to invoke it with -f do which gives you a single column (one row per file) with filenames. Combined with the power of Vim it gives you all the tools you need to do massive filename editing.
You can now edit the filenames like editing text in every plain text editor. You may even chose to replace the filenames using regular expressions (note that unfortunately Emacs uses a different syntax than PCRE).
For me the pyRenamer worked the best. Nothing (sadly) comes close to Total Commanders built it renaming tool. pyRenamer doesn't integrate with Krusader but considering the fact, that you don't use the renaming tools that often anyway, pyRenamer is a very good option.
Personally I use Ant Renamer with Wine because nothing I've tried (Mtamorphose, PyRenamer, GPRename, KRename) is as powerful, easy to install and easy to use. And it's still FOSS so I don't see the problem.
Besides the usual rename functions like replacing a portion of the text with some other text, inserting or removing text, renaming file extensions, and so on, this tool can rename folders, rename music based on tags, and rename photos using their Exif information. It can even batch rename using file attributes like the creation or modification date.
Previously I used a tool called Bulk Rename utility for nenaming a batch of files at once. I came across the Thunar app, but now i am struggling to understand how it will go about doing the same thing as the above mentioned program did for me in Windows.
In the above example, is there a method to search for file names containing the #, and rename the file with the same name minus the #? That would be ideal, and resolve the bulk of the issue, making the rest more manageable.
specify illegal characters and what you want to replace them with (or simply remove them) and press go - most product contain a preview function so you can see the output before it makes the changes, some products create an undo file
Just an added FYI we use a script that calls robocopy to do our migrations to SP, in doing so it (among other code) removes illegal characters in files and renames long filename, those that are over 225 character limit.
c80f0f1006