First change directory to the one containing the files you wish to bulk rename:

cd /Users/tony/Downloads/Mexico/

Example of files inside of a directory:

tony@Tonys-MacBook-Air Mexico % ls -1
122 - Mexico - 45674856477658.jpg
123 - Mexico - 75934757979557.jpg
124 - Mexico - 75385739579753.jpg
125 - Mexico - 39579375938789.jpg
126 - Mexico - 73473957397593.jpg
127 - Mexico - 43749375937998.jpg
128 - Mexico - 49374937593999.jpg
129 - Mexico - 94375973583958.jpg

We are looking to remove everything but the unique string and the file extension at the end.

For example “125 – Mexico – 39579375938789.jpg” would turn into “39579375938789.jpg”.

Lets try return a list of our files with a find command (from inside the directory with the files):

find . -type f -name '*.jpg'

The list appears correctly now pipe into while loop with:

find . -type f -name '*.jpg' | while read FILE ; do
newfile="$(echo ${FILE} | sed 's/^[^-]* - //' | sed 's/^[^-]* - //')" ;
mv "${FILE}" "${newfile}" ;
done

After the above is run all the files will be renamed to my desired format. This is particularly useful if there are 100’s of files.

Explanation:

• find = Look for something on Linux
  • . = Look inside current directory
  • -type f = Look just for files and ignore directories
  • -name ‘*.jpg’ = Look for files matching wildcard *.jpg
• FILE = Self declared variable. Could be anything you wish but is always equal to the command previous to it in the example above.
• sed ‘s/^[^-]* – //’ = Removes anything before a “-” this helps me get my desired output name inside of created variable newfile. There are two dashes thats why I run it twice.

Notes:

• Depending on your original files naming convention you may need to change the sed argument applied to the newfile variable to something that gives you the desired output name.