Bren - A bulk file rename tool for the shell

Updated: 2023-09-28

What is Bren?

Bren is a command line tool for GNU/Linux (and many others). Bren is simple, fast and it's written in C. Bren is licensed under the GPL.

With Bren it's easy to rename multiple files (even hundreds of them) in one go. Bren also supports post-rename scripting using GNU Guile programming language, but you do not need to use it, in order to rename files.

Download and install

Source code for Bren is on Github. It includes a manual page, installation/compiling instructions as well as a GNU Guile sample script. Latest stable version is 0.4 and it was released on 2023-09-28.

At the moment I don't provide binaries for Bren, so you have to compile it for yourself. You can read the instructions in here.

Example usage

Simple example to use Bren:

bren -p "/path/to/a/directory/with/files" -b "myphoto"

This would rename every file in given path using the basename. For example, if your directory has files img34324.jpg, img345435.jpg and img7667.jpg they would be renamed to myphoto(1).jpg, myphoto(2).jpg and myphoto(3).jpg.

Bren includes a manual page, after installing type man bren to read it. The manual includes multiple examples and all the possible command line options for Bren. It's also available online.