Batch Rename Folders only

Question

Hello
I require a Terminal command for Batch renaming only folders....leaving files alone.
Does such a command or script exist?
Thank you,
Tim

Answer 1

There are any number of ways of doing this. I'd start with find:
find /path/to/start -type d
Which will give you a list of directories. Without knowing your renaming scheme, though, it's impossible to be more specific. As an example, though, to rename all directories to append "-new" to their name, you could:
find /path/to/start -type d -exec mv {} {}-new \;
This tells find that for each found item it should execute the mv command (where {} gets substituted with the current matched item).
Note that you might need to quote the {}'s if your folder names contain spaces or certain punctuation, so:
find /path/to/start -type d -exec mv \"{}\" \"{}\"-new \;
In addition, you don't specify whether you want to be recursive (i.e. change all folders inside folders), or just work at the top level. You can control that using the -depth switch:
find /path/to/start -type d -depth 1 -exec mv \"{}\" \"{}\"-new \;
where -depth 1 tells find to only descend one folder deep.
It gets better. Since application (.app) files are really directories as far as the shell is concerned, you might want to exclude .app files if there are any in your directory:
find . -type d ! -name "*.app" -depth 1 -exec mv \"{}\" \"{}-new\" \;
where ! -name "*.app" tells find to exclude any file/directory name that matches *.app.
Who knew it'd be so easy, huh?