Changing all files' extensions in a folder with one command on Windows

Question

How can I use the Windows command line to change the extensions of thousands of files to *****.jpg?

what do you mean by changing all extensions as *****.jpg? does it means all files extensions to jpg? if yes use ren *.* *.jpg — Imran Rizvi, Mar 27 '12 at 07:42

score 368 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 10 '18 at 00:21

368

You can use ren (as in rename):

ren *.XXX *.YYY

And of course, switch XXX and YYY for the appropriate extensions. It will change from XXX to YYY. If you want to change all extensions, just use the wildcard again:

ren *.* *.YYY

One way to make this work recursively is with the FOR command. It can be used with the /R option to recursively apply a command to matching files. For example:

for /R %x in (*.txt) do ren "%x" *.renamed

will change all .txt extensions to .renamed recursively, starting in the current directory. %x is the variable that holds the matched file names.

And, since you have thousands of files, make sure to wait until the cursor starts blinking again indicating that it's done working.

Note: this works only on cmd. Won't work on Powershell or Bash

edited Dec 10 '18 at 00:21

Karol Zlot

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answered Mar 27 '12 at 07:42

keyser

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*.XXX will change files for that particular extension (means it will rename all files with extension XXX) – Habib Mar 27 '12 at 07:44
@keyser5053 also can i get a report about the action made here.. with using `ren *.* *.jpg > E:\Log\Cmd\ExtChange\ext.txt`? – Berker Yüceer Mar 27 '12 at 12:34
And how about recursive replacement in all sub-dirs? – NightElfik Sep 10 '14 at 05:44
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@NightElfik I added a recursive example that uses `FOR` – keyser Sep 14 '14 at 13:53
@MonaJalal In cmd.exe on Windows? – keyser Oct 25 '16 at 13:00
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I couldn't get this to work in powershell, but it worked fine in cmd.exe. Just so that others are aware. – hazzey Oct 01 '17 at 00:29
`ren` not found in my CMD console. – Si8 Jan 01 '21 at 21:42
When doing a wildcard match, you need to include the match in the target filename: `ren "*.html" "#1.pug"` – Martinffx Jan 31 '23 at 08:17

score 33 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 27 '12 at 07:43

33

on CMD

type

ren *.* *.jpg

. will select all files, and rename to * (what ever name they have) plus extension to jpg

answered Mar 27 '12 at 07:43

Habib

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score 12 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 11 '13 at 15:11

Rename behavior is sometimes 'less than intuitive'; for example...

ren *.THM *.jpg will rename your THM files to have an extension of .jpg. eg: GEDC003.THM will be GEDC003.jpg

ren *.THM *b.jpg will rename your THM files to *.THMb.jpg. eg: GEDC004.THM will become GEDC004.THMb.jpg

ren *.THM *.b.jpg will rename your THM files to *.b.jpg eg: GEDC005.THM will become GEDC005.b.jpg

score 7 · Answer 4 · edited Jun 24 '16 at 05:27

7

NOTE: not for Windows

Using ren-1.0 the correct form is:

"ren *.*" "#2.jpg"

From man ren

The replacement pattern is another filename with embedded wildcard indexes, each of which consists of the character # followed by a digit from 1 to 9. In the new name of a matching file, the wildcard indexes are replaced by the actual characters that matched the referenced wildcards in the original filename.

and

Note that the shell normally expands the wildcards * and ?, which in the case of ren is undesirable. Thus, in most cases it is necessary to enclose the search pattern in quotes.

edited Jun 24 '16 at 05:27

Michael Freidgeim

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answered Mar 03 '15 at 14:59

gbonetti

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I had to use #1: ren "*.csv" "#1.json" – elmalto Jun 10 '15 at 15:39
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`man ren`? The question was about Windows/`cmd`. Do those now provide `man` pages? What is `ren-1.0` and how can we view its `man` page in context? – underscore_d Jun 21 '16 at 15:21

score 6 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 27 '12 at 07:44

6

thats simple

ren *.* *.jpg

try this in command prompt

answered Mar 27 '12 at 07:44

Imran Rizvi

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score 4 · Answer 6 · answered Apr 16 '22 at 07:02

For my windows, ren command wasn't working. So, I googled a little bit and wrote a universal solution in bash. You can try running it in on git bash from windows and it also runs on linux shell.

for f in `find * -type f | grep .png`; do mv -- "$f" "${f%.png}.jpg"; done

score 3 · Answer 7 · edited Nov 06 '13 at 09:23

Rename multiple file extensions:

You want to change ringtone1.mp3, ringtone2.mp3 to ringtone1.wav, ringtone2.wav

Here is how to do that: I am in d drive on command prompt (CMD) so I use:

d:\>ren *.* *.wav

This is just an example of file extensions, you can use any type of file extension like WAV, MP3, JPG, GIF, bmp, PDF, DOC, DOCX, TXT this depends on what your operating system.

And, since you have thousands of files, make sure to wait until the cursor starts blinking again indicating that it's done working.

score 3 · Answer 8 · answered Jun 13 '18 at 07:14

Just for people looking to do this in batch files, this code is working:

FOR /R "C:\Users\jonathan\Desktop\test" %%f IN (*.jpg) DO REN "%%f" *.png

In this example all files with .jpg extensions in the C:\Users\jonathan\Desktop\test directory are changed to *.png.

score 2 · Answer 9 · answered Dec 16 '21 at 07:52

2

I had the problem with a designer delivering images without extension (apple mac sometimes does it). So use can use

ren *. *.jpg

to add an extension, so that a windows user can use the files.

answered Dec 16 '21 at 07:52

Marco

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Thanks. Your answer was useful for me. I had to remove all the files extensions, but I didn't know that syntax with empty extension on right side of the dot. I executed `ren *.* *.` and it remove all the extensions. – august0490 Apr 25 '22 at 09:11

Marc.2377 · Answer 10 · 2019-04-16T00:16:14.277

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In my case I had a directory with 800+ files ending with .StoredProcedure.sql (they were scripted with SSMS).

The solutions posted above didn't work. But I came up with this:

_{(Based on answers to batch programming - get relative path of file)}

@echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
for %%f in (*) do (
  set B=%%f
  set B=!B:%CD%\=!
  ren "!B!" "!B:.StoredProcedure=!"
)

The above script removes the substring .StoredProcedure from the filename. I'm sure it can be adapted to cover more cases, ask for input and be overall more generic.

edited Apr 16 '19 at 00:16

answered Apr 15 '19 at 23:56

Marc.2377

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replace your two `set` commands with this single one: `set "B=%%~nxf"`. (`%%~nxf` is **n**ame and e**x**tension of `%%f`). `%cd%` might be invalid, when you do it recursive. – Stephan Apr 16 '19 at 09:02

score 1 · Answer 11 · answered Dec 11 '19 at 07:46

I know this is so old, but i've landed on it , and the provided answers didn't works for me on powershell so after searching found this solution

to do it in powershell

Get-ChildItem -Path C:\Demo -Filter *.txt | Rename-Item -NewName {[System.IO.Path]::ChangeExtension($_.Name, ".old")}

credit goes to http://powershell-guru.com/powershell-tip-108-bulk-rename-extensions-of-files/

score 1 · Answer 12 · answered Jun 21 '22 at 14:24

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Use cmd not powershell, then it will work.

answered Jun 21 '22 at 14:24

Md Mostafizur Rahman

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score 0 · Answer 13 · answered Dec 31 '19 at 12:13

0

An alternative way to rename files using the renamer npm package.

below is an example of renaming files extensions

renamer -d --path-element ext --find ts --replace js *

answered Dec 31 '19 at 12:13

Sagar

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score 0 · Answer 14 · answered Feb 27 '20 at 18:53

0

What worked for me is this one(cd to the folder first):

Get-ChildItem -Filter *.old | Rename-Item -NewName {[System.IO.Path]::ChangeExtension($_.Name, ".new")}

answered Feb 27 '20 at 18:53

roger

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score 0 · Answer 15 · answered Dec 09 '22 at 09:02

0

You can try this to rename into *.jpg:

forfiles /S /M *.* /C "cmd /c rename @file @fname.jpg"

answered Dec 09 '22 at 09:02

Andark

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Changing all files' extensions in a folder with one command on Windows

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