how to use PowerShell to rename multiple files at once?

PowerShell Help
1

Basically I have thousands of files. I rename first file as “file0001.txt” for example. Now I want the rest of files to be renamed as “file0002.txt”, “file0003.txt”, etc. How can I achieve that using PowerShell? Thanks a lot!

2

Hi John

You will want to use a foreach loop to iterate through all the files in your directory. Here is an example:

get-childitem D:\Stuff\ -File | ForEach-Object {Rename-Item -Path $_.FullName -NewName "NewName$(Get-Random).txt"}

Doing this allows us the pass all the files in D:\Stuff to the Rename-Item Cmdlet. The rename-Item cmdlet needs to know exactly what it’s renaming so we use the FullName property from Get-Childitem to do this.

It’s important to note that in the above example this would rename ALL files to this new standard. If you wanted just text files to be renamed you would use a filter on your Get-Childitem cmdlet to only gather these before piping them along. Also, the use of Get-Random here is to just for files since they require a unique name.

if you wanted an example where the files are named in order you could use something like this, also this example will filter for only .txt files to be renamed:

$Files = gci D:\Stuff\ -Filter *.txt -file

for ($i = 0; $i -lt $Files.count; $i++){

Rename-Item -Path $Files[$i].FullName -NewName "NewName_$i.txt"

}

Let us know if you require any further help.

3

Hi John,
If you want to get something similar to “file0001.txt” etc, try

$files = get-childitem C:\myfiles -recurse | Where { !($_.PSIsContainer) }
$count = 0
foreach($file in $files){
If ($count -lt 10)
{
	Rename-Item -path $file.FullName -NewName "file000$count"
	$count++
}
elseif ($count -lt 100)
{
	Rename-Item -Path $file.FullName -NewName "file00$count"
	$count++
}
}

I’ll walk you through what is happening
First I’m getting the list of files, in the top folder, and sub folders, and sticking them in a variable. I’m excluding the actual folder objects, if we start renaming those, the whole thing will break.
Then I create a variable to store the current count, starting at 0.

Then for every file that we stored earlier, we’re going to rename it. If $count is less than 10, i.e. is a single digit number, we’ll append “000$count” to the end of our new file name. Then while $count is less than 100 (2 digit number), we stick “00$count” on the end. Obviously, if you want to go all the way to say 9999, you will need to add a couple more “if’s”, but this will allow you to name the files from 0000 upwards.

Flynn’s method will work, and is much shorter, but I think the files will be named
file1.txt
file2.txt
file3.txt
file4.txt
file5.txt
file6.txt
file7.txt
file8.txt
file9.txt
file10.txt
file100.txt
file1000.txt
etc - They won’t keep the standardised name/length you seem to be after. I could be wrong.

4

Flynn and Liam, thanks so much for your help. I just changed a little bit on your codes to fit my need and it works perfectly!

5

Using PowerShell is very difficul, there is a simple solution for your trouble. I suggest you to try BatchRenameFiles Tool program You can easily found hier BatchRenameFiles.org

6

Try this:

$i = 0
gci C:\temp | Where { !($_.PSIsContainer) } | % {
   $i += 1
   Rename-item $_.FullName -NewName ((Split-path $_.FullName -Parent) + ("\file" + ([string]$i).Padleft(4,"0") + $_.Extension )) -WhatIf
}