Simultaneously renaming multiple files with different names - linux

Question

I have around 150 files with the same .txt extension, but the filenames are just alphanumeric strings (e.g. 7J9E45600.txt, FF5632088.txt, etc.). I have a list where the alphanumeric strings are matched to more meaningful names. I want to replace these alphanumeric strings with the meaningful names, but would like to do it programatically. Most of the existing solutions allow to rename multiple files with incrementally increasing numbers, e.g. via a loop command, but in my case all the filenames will be different. An example of what I want to do is as follows: rename 7J9E45600.txt to adipose.txt, rename FF5632088.txt to brain.txt, etc. A solution utilizing Linux, R, Perl or Python is most welcome.

Answer 1

Yes, this is easy to do with a for loop in R.
Make or read in your data, with a column of old names, and a matching column containing the new names. I copied an example with four files.
oldnames<-c("/Users/foo/Documents/pictures/Test/2020-04-21 19.59.jpg",
"/Users/foo/Documents/pictures/Test/2020-04-21 19.59.35.jpg",
"/Users/foo/Documents/pictures/Test/2020-04-21 19.58.37.jpg",
"/Users/foo/Documents/pictures/Test/2020-04-21 17.21.06.jpg")
newnames<-c("/Users/foo/Documents/pictures/Test/2021-04-21 19.59.59.jpg",
"/Users/foo/Documents/pictures/Test/2021-04-21 19.59.35.jpg",
"/Users/foo/Documents/pictures/Test/2021-04-21 19.58.37.jpg",
"/Users/foo/Documents/pictures/Test/2021-04-21 17.21.06.jpg")
testnames_df<-data.frame(cbind(oldnames,newnames))
for (i in 1:4) {file.rename(from=testnames_df$oldnames[i], to = testnames_df$newnames[i])}