Often you may want to use Bash to add a prefix to all files with a specific extension in a directory.
You can use the following syntax to do so:
for file in *.txt; do mv "$file" "new_${file}"; done
This particular example will add the prefix new_ to the beginning of each .txt file in the current directory.
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: Add Prefix to All Files in Directory in Bash
We can use the ls command to first view all files in our current directory:
We can see that the current directory contains the following files:
- coaches.txt
- employees.csv
- interns.csv
- owners.txt
- players.txt
Suppose that we would like to add the prefix new_ to the beginning of each .txt file in this directory.
We can use the following syntax to do so:
for file in *.txt; do mv "$file" "new_${file}"; done
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that when we use the ls command again to view the updated files in the current directory, we can see that each .txt file has had the prefix new_ appended to it:
- coaches.txt has been renamed to new_coaches.txt
- owners.txt has been renamed to new_owners.txt
- players.txt has been renamed to new_players.txt
All other files in the current directory that did not have a .txt extension have been left unchanged.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Bash:
Bash: How to Remove Prefix from All Filenames
Bash: How to Remove Prefix from a String
Bash: How to Add Suffix to All Files in Directory
Bash: How to Remove Prefix from a String
