Rename File with dashes Windows Command Line

Question

So this works:

File1-suffix.txt
ren "*-suffix.txt" "*-newsuffix.txt"
File1-newsuffix.txt

But this fails:

File1-suffixA-suffixB.txt
ren "*-suffixA-suffixB.txt" "*-newsuffixA-suffixB.txt"
File1-suffixA-newsuffixA-suffixB.txt

Why is the original suffixA retained?

I have studied the documenation here & here

However I see nothing regarding dashes causing problems.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 10 '24 at 11:22

2

The ren pattern substitution code does its job without any knowledge about what was originally matched by * in the "input" pattern – it only receives the replacement pattern and has to apply the wildcard rules anew. According to those rules, the function lets each * match as much as possible up to (not including) the last instance of the - character that follows; in your case, this means that the * in replacement pattern will match the entire File1-suffixA.

The source code indeed notes that it won't do the right thing in many cases. (See wildcard_rename() and WinEditName() in XPSP1/NT/base/cmd/cpwork.c on GitHub.)

answered Jan 10 '24 at 11:22

u1686_grawity

452,512

Thank you, is there an alternative way of acheiving this rename on the Windows Command Line – GreyCloud Jan 10 '24 at 12:08
PowerShell and its built-in regex substitution features. – u1686_grawity Jan 10 '24 at 12:31
sadly i cannot use powershell in this application – GreyCloud Jan 10 '24 at 13:57
Possibly a for loop with Cmd's built-in string substitution, then? %var:old=new% seems like it should be enough for your specific example. – u1686_grawity Jan 10 '24 at 14:12

Rename File with dashes Windows Command Line

1 Answers1