Move and rename all files in a folder

I wanted to move and rename a bunch of excel files in a folder. This is one way to do it from the command line, copying into a directory in the parent folder. I did it this way to be able to rm -r old_folder after copying my files to the new folder. You could modify it to rename them in place, but I’ve accidentally rm -rfed enough things to get nervous doing it that way.

for f in *; do mv "$f" "../new_folder/old_$f; done"

And just for good measure (and to include a note about string substitution), if all of you files were of the form file.suffix and you wanted the old at the end of the new files it would go like this:

for f in *; do mv "$f" "../new_folder/${f/.suffix/_old.suffix}"; done"

This will do the same as the first example, replacing .suffix with _old.suffix. So file.suffix becomes file_old.suffix. In general, the format is:

${parameter/pattern/string}

Where parameter is the thing you want to change, pattern is a string or regular expression and string is what you want to replace it with.