Batch renaming with the rename utility

I was in a situation recently where I had a directory full of .whl files I wanted to rename to .zip files. Fortunately, there is the rename utility, which appears to be a thin Perl wrapper.

Given the directory:

In addition, I needed to chop off everything that came after the first -, e.g.:

asn1crypto.zip
cffi.zip
cryptography.zip
...

We can use the following rename command:

rename -n 's/([\w]+)-.*/$1.zip/' *.whl

Where:

• The -n (-nono) flag prevents the utility from actually performing the changes:

-n, -nono
        No action: print names of files to be renamed, but
        don't rename.

• Parentheses are used to capture the group of characters that match the enclosed pattern, and $1 is used to refer to the first such captured group
• *.whl defines the files that will be renamed

Et voilà!