That means that the entire Perl language is available to you - so you could write several pages of code that access a database, run something on a remote machine, or fetch a URL in order to rename your file. Why couldn't you find it in the man-page? Well, there is a line in there that casually says you can pass a line of Perl code to modify the name.

Sample Output 'MOV12A.MOD' would be renamed to 'MOV298. If you want to put the date in too, you can do: rename -dry-run 's/+/hex($&)/e s|.MOD|. I would recommend you make a backup before trying this anyway, because if your films are actually named 'Film 23.MOD' rather than 'MOV12B.MOD' you will get: 'Film 23.MOD' would be renamed to '15ilm 23.MOD' If you like what it does, remove the -dry-run part and do it for real. 'MOVBEEF.MOD' would be renamed to 'MOV48879.MOD' 'MOV12C.MOD' would be renamed to 'MOV300.MOD' 'MOV12B.MOD' would be renamed to 'MOV299.MOD' Sample Output 'MOV10.MOD' would be renamed to 'MOV16.MOD' Then the command is: rename -dry-run 's/+/hex($&)/e' *MOD Sure, you can do it with rename, also known as Perl rename and prename which is most simply installed on macOS with homebrew using: brew install rename

Rename osx