Pipe the output of Dir to Rename-Item and you’re in business. Using PowerShell, you can pipe the output of one command-known as a “commandlet” in PowerShell terms-to another command, just like you can on Linux and other UNIX-like systems. The two important commands you’ll need are Dir, which lists the files in the current directory, and Rename-Item, which renames an item (a file, in this case). PowerShell offers even more flexibility for renaming files in a command-line environment. If you’re interested, the folks over at the Lagmonster forums have an excellent writeup on the subject. RELATED: How to Write a Batch Script on WindowsĪnd this only begins to address the kinds of command line wizardy you can get into if you want to build more complicated commands-or even batch scripts-by weaving other commands and conditionals into things. html extension to use the same file name and same first three letters only of the file extension, which ends up cutting the “l” off of all the extensions in the folder. I weight the issues of cost/complexity/frequency of use before I take on new software.This tells Windows to rename all files with the. I’ve generally avoided add-ons as I try to keep things as vanilla as possible to forestall problems. UPDATE: see Quick Look: A Better Finder Rename. MPG: I have not looked into these products, but a quick look suggests they are vastly superior to the macOS Finder. They’re not free like the Finder feature, but are vastly more capable. The ‘Big Mean Folder Machine’ is also a good app when managing large hierarchical libraries: It’s great for OCD file organization.(After using it in trial mode I was impressed enough to buy the ‘Forever Upgrade’ a number of years ago, and have benefitted ever since.)

I have used it for normalizing many filenames (thousands at a time) from disparate sources, along with folder names. It’s a fantastically-capable batch processor.

I think including the word ‘Finder’ in the app name makes it sound like it’s some sort of extension.

If you don’t already use it, I highly recommend ‘A Better Finder Rename’: Renaming files to include date and time Don H writes:

Batch rename files mac