How to add a period to all files starting with a certain pattern in terminal?

distro_dave

I have several files all starting with the name template_file template_images I want to make these files hidden by adding a period before all of them. What is the terminal command line I can use to add a period with all files starting with template as its filename so now they are all ex. .template_file .template_images etc.

Originally asked by AMVPlusPlus on Stack Exchange (unix) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

Like this : rename -n 's/^template/.$&/' template* Remove -n switch when the output looks good. There are other tools with the same name which may or may not be able to do this, so be careful. The rename command that is part of the util-linux package, won't. If you run the following command ( GNU ) $ file "$(readlink -f "$(type -p rename)")" and you have a result that contains Perl script, ASCII text executable and not containing ELF , then this seems to be the right tool =) If not, to make it the default (usually already the case) on Debian and derivative like Ubuntu : $ sudo update-alternatives --set rename /path/to/rename Replace /path/to/rename to the path of your perl rename...

Full answer by Gilles Quénot: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/557895 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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