I had to rename a bunch of files in a directory by just changing a prefix. Perfect for the command line, no?
After a bit of googling (that exists as a verb now, doesn’t it? 
) I found this article:Batch File Rename By File Extension in Unix
All you need to do is iterate over all of the files in directory, and then rename by echoing the name & running sed on it, i.e.
for i in *; do mv $i `echo $i | sed 's/search/replace/'`; done
If you need to iterate over a tree of directories or only rename certain files, you can run this command
for f in `find . -type f -name "filename"`; do mv $f `echo $f | sed "s/search/replace/"`; done
If you are using git, you can also exchange mv with git mv.
As always: backups and/or version control are your friends!
