Just discovered the rename utility under Linux

Warning: There appears to be two ‘rename’ utilities one under Debian 6.0.7 works as below and is a Perl utility. The other, which I found on Fedora 19 is part of util-linux, and doesn’t work the same way (i.e. it’s a lot dumber).

Work-a-round copy /usr/bin/prename from your Debian system to /usr/bin on your Fedora System and run prename instead of rename.

rename
Usage: rename [-v] [-n] [-f] perlexpr [filenames]

myuser@mypc:~$ mkdir rename_test
myuser@mypc:~$ cd rename_test/
# create some test files
myuser@mypc:~/rename_test$ touch file1.txt
myuser@mypc:~/rename_test$ touch file2.txt
myuser@mypc:~/rename_test$ touch file3.pdf
myuser@mypc:~/rename_test$ touch file4.ogg
myuser@mypc:~/rename_test$ ls
file1.txt  file2.txt  file3.pdf  file4.ogg
myuser@mypc:~/rename_test$ ren
rename     rename.ul  renice
myuser@mypc:~/rename_test$ rename
Usage: rename [-v] [-n] [-f] perlexpr [filenames]
myuser@mypc:~/rename_test$ rename 's/file/new_prefix/g' *
myuser@mypc:~/rename_test$ ls
new_prefix1.txt  new_prefix2.txt  new_prefix3.pdf  new_prefix4.ogg