Batch renaming files

On Debian and derivatives, Perl's rename works similarly to sed like this:

  rename -v 's/image//' *.png

There's also the rename from util-linux that works like this, instead:

  rename image '' *.png

If you are using Bash or other POSIX-compatible shell:

for f in *.png; do
    mv -- "$f" "${f#image}"
done

zmv

The zsh shell has a powerful batch rename command called zmv.

First you need to enable the zmv command as follows (this can go into your ~/.zshrc).

autoload zmv

The basic syntax is zmv PATTERN REPLACEMENT. The pattern is a shell glob expression. Parts of the pattern can be surrounded by parentheses. The replacement text can contain $1, $2, etc. to refer to the Nth parenthesised group in the pattern. For example:

zmv 'image(*.png)' '$1'

You can also ask zsh to automatically define $1, $2, etc. to match the wildcard characters in the pattern:

zmv -w 'image*.png' '$1.png'