--- title: "Advanced Multi File Rename" url: "https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/advanced-multi-file-rename.md" canonical: "https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/advanced-multi-file-rename/" tags: [] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Lesson 10 of 15 in Commanding Total Commander (File Ninja: Searching, Filtering and Selecting Files), 2:15. Free video by Roy Osherove." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Advanced Multi File Rename 1. [Courses](https://courses.osherove.com/#courses) 2. [Commanding Total Commander](https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/) 3. File Ninja: Searching, Filtering and Selecting Files Lesson 10 of 15 Duration: 2:15 [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k417yKcP_7E) ## In this lesson Roy selects files with Ctrl-A and opens the multi-rename tool with Ctrl-M, where N stands for the current name of the file and the old and new names are shown before the rename runs. The last rename can be undone, and other options include a counter before or after the name, search and replace (such as changing 01 to January), and lower or upper case. ## Transcript 351 words [\[00:05\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k417yKcP_7E&t=5s) Let's talk about multi- renames. Well, let's assume that we want to take all these files and give them a prefix. So, I can for example control A and select all of them and then press CtrlM or go to file multi- rename tool. And here I have a very powerful and simple way to rename all the files. For example, the N stands for the current name of the file. So I can say that for all the files I'm going to have new name. Now here I see the old name. [\[00:36\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k417yKcP_7E&t=36s) Here I see the new name that's going to happen. So I can just put that here. Press go. Press close and or escape. And you can see that there is a new name. Now if I press CtrlM again, let's say I want to undo. That's actually pretty easy to do. I can press undo here. it will undo the last action that it just did. So this way if I'm not happy with my rename can always go back. [\[01:08\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k417yKcP_7E&t=68s) Now rename also has some other nice features. For example, I can get rid of the whole name or put a counter if I have multiple files of the same name. I can put a counter before or after the file name so that I get a counter just before the file name. So it's one, two, three, whatever. Another option is let's say that I there's something I don't like in all the files. I can do a search for something in the file. Let's say I want to change all the months or all all the days that are 27 or all the 01 to January. [\[01:44\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k417yKcP_7E&t=104s) So I can say find 01 change it with January start. And you can see that it's all saved. So multi-rename is a very powerful tool. There are many other options like use lowerase, uppercase, range. You can even create your own plugins for this stuff. You can even define when the count counter starts and ends. So overall take care. Learn this tool. It will help you greatly. [Previous lesson Searching and 'Feed to Listbox'](https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/searching-and-feed-to-listbox/) [Next lesson Space Calculator and Copy Queues](https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/space-calculator-and-copy-queues/) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/