rename files and dirs under linux

Question

why the following command " find / -name 'node1' -print0 | xargs -0 rename 's/node1/node_STAR/' " not replace the node1 under /var/tmp directory?

my target is to scan linux sys and rename directories and files

example from my linux machine

pwd
/var/tmp/Change_host_dir
find  /  -name '*node1*'  -print0 | xargs -0
/var/tmp/Change_host_dir/node1
find  /  -name '*node1*'  -print0 | xargs -0 rename 's/node1/node_STAR/'
ls
node1

Answer 1

The standard linux rename command man page says:

rename will rename the specified files by replacing the first occurrence of from in their name by to.

so it's just for simple file renames. This is the standard rename from util-linux, available on all linux systems I am aware of.

I think you are probably trying to use Larry Wall's example perl rename script. If that's what you really want, create this file in your path:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# rename script examples from lwall:
#       rename 's/\.orig$//' *.orig
#       rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/ unless /^Make/' *
#       rename '$_ .= ".bad"' *.f
#       rename 'print "$_: "; s/foo/bar/ if <stdin> =~ /^y/i' *

$op = shift;
for (@ARGV) {
    $was = $_;
    eval $op;
    die $@ if $@;
    rename($was,$_) unless $was eq $_;
}

make it executable with chmod 755 rename, and call it instead of the system rename. I tested it with your example and it works.

Answer 2

try with

find / -name node1 -exec rename blahblah {} \;