#Linux find directory by name how to

If not you should be able to easily install it. Most Linux distributions will also have the rename command available. However, mv isn’t the only way to do it, and whilst mv works well for renaming single directories, it doesn’t have any inbuilt capability for renaming multiple directories (though there are ways to have mv do this, more on that later). That’s how straight forward it is to rename Linux directories using the mv command. You can confirm the that renaming the directory has worked as expected by listing the contents of the parent directory, which in this example is my home folder: $ ls -lah /home/centos/Īs you can see in the image above, I now have a directory called dir2. The mv command simply changes the directory name, it doesn’t affect any of the files contained within. If the directory contains any files, they will be left unchanged. Nice and easy! So as a practical example, if I had a directory in my home folder called dir1 and I wanted to rename the directory to dir2 I could use the mv command like this: $ mv /home/centos/dir1 /home/centos/dir2 The syntax to use mv to rename a directory on Linux is as follows: $ mv sourcedir targetdir And, we can use it to ‘move’ a directory to a new name. It supports moving single files, multiple files and whole directories. The mv command is a command line utility that moves files or directories from one place to another. The command most often used to rename directories in Linux is the mv command, so that is where we will start! Rename Directories on Linux I’ll be using my CentOS system for the examples in this article, but it will be much the same for other distributions.

#Linux find directory by name how to

We will start by giving some simple examples of how to do so using the command line tools commonly available on Linux distributions, then move onto some more advanced examples. This article aims to help you out if you need to rename a directory on Linux, or multiple directories at the same time. If you are from a Windows background, you may not yet be familiar with the ways and commands to rename directories on Linux. File-system management is an important skill to have if you are working with Linux systems often.