First you will need to load the zmv function by running autoload zmv from the command prompt. So assuming you have ZSH, let’s take a look at what we can do. It’s the default shell in macOS these days so if you are on Catalina onwards – you already have it. So, as zmv requires ZSH shell, at the risk of stating the obvious, you’ll need a ZSH shell. So, to reiterate my my use case, I had a project where I wanted to change all files ending in. Turns out this is a great little tool I’d not used before, and as it met my needs beautifully, I thought I’d give a brief overview for my future self and any passing travellers. It was suggested I look at zmv which works in the ZSH shell. So I happened to ask in the Sublime Text Discord how people did this. I didn’t fancy renaming them ‘by hand’, and the Finder batch rename is only really useful when all the files are in one folder and/or you can easily select them all. There were around a hundred files nested in many different sub-folders.

I had a situation today where I wanted to migrate a large-ish codebase from standard CSS files to Sass files with a *.scss file extension. This is a quick tip rather than an involved tutorial.

Batch rename files in folder