Often you may want to use Bash to add a suffix 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 "$file" "${file%.txt}_new.txt"; done
This particular example will add the suffix _new to the end of each .txt file in the current directory.
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: Add Suffix 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
- managers.txt
- owners.txt
- players.txt
Suppose that we would like to add the suffix _new to the end of each .txt file in this directory.
We can use the following syntax to do so:
for file in *.txt; do mv "$file" "${file%.txt}_new.txt"; 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 suffix _new appended to it.
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 List All Files in Folder by Size
Bash: How to List All Files in Folder Without Extension
Bash: How to List All Files Matching a Specific Pattern
