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Jul 27, 2023

2 Quick and Free Methods for Batch Renaming Files on Mac

Member-only story Felix X. Follow -- 1 Share If you find yourself in a situation where you need to rename a large number of files manually, it can really ruin your day. I recently encountered this

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Felix X.

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If you find yourself in a situation where you need to rename a large number of files manually, it can really ruin your day. I recently encountered this problem when I had a folder full of hundreds of teaching videos with confusing file names that were causing issues with my Infuse media library software.

So, I did some research to find a simple solution, and to my surprise, I discovered that there are many paid software options available to accomplish this task. When I searched for “rename” in the Mac App Store, I found hundreds of apps, ranging in price from free to several tens of dollars! It was quite astonishing.

In this article, I will introduce two quick, free, and high-quality methods for batch renaming files on a Mac.

This is an incredibly efficient method that I highly recommend trying out!You can describe your requirements to ChatGPT or Claude and have them generate a piece of code that can be directly executed in the Mac Terminal. Simply copy and paste the generated code into the Terminal, hit “Enter,” and voila!For most simple tasks, your files should be renamed accordingly. Take a look in the folder to see the results.The advantage of this approach is its incredible flexibility. ChatGPT can generate code that supports advanced syntax, including regular expressions. In other words, it can accurately implement almost any rule you describe.

The only thing to consider is how to effectively describe your requirements to ChatGPT in clear natural language, particularly when crafting an efficient prompt. Here’s an example:

```markdown[Request] I am using a Mac system and need to rename all files in a folder, removing the numeric suffix at the end of the file names. Please provide me with a code snippet that can be directly executed in the Terminal.[Example]File name: learn-python-101-S1E1–109345.mp4Expected output: learn-python-101-S1E1.mp4```