The purpose of special argument -, which is supported by most utilities, is to signal that subsequent arguments should be treated as operands (values), even if they look like options due to starting with -, as Jacob C. Similar to the bash solution, s/././ performs text substitution, but - unlike in bash - true regular expressions are used.Select a Name format for the style of format you want. Select Format from the drop down menu at the top of the set of rename tools. You can also right or control + click on the files. The software allows you to merge high volumes of files of any size. Bulk File Merger is a desktop program that will quickly merge multiple files on your Mac or Windows in literally seconds. Here's the equivalent of the command at the top using rename: rename -n -e 's/_.*_/_/' *.pngĪgain, this command performs a dry run remove -n to perform actual renaming. Click on the Action button at the top of the Finder window. Bulk Rename Utility allows you to easily rename files and entire folders based upon extremely flexible criteria.

On macOS you can install it using popular package manager Homebrew as follows: brew install rename If you find yourself batch-renaming files frequently, consider installing a specialized tool such as the Perl-based rename utility. Note that _*_ is a pattern (a wildcard expression, as also used for globbing), not a regular expression (to learn about patterns, run man bash and search for Pattern Matching).In your specific case you can use the following bash command ( bash is the default shell on macOS): for f in *.png do echo mv '$f' '$' is an application of bash parameter expansion: the (first) substring matching pattern _*_ is replaced with literal _, effectively cutting the middle token from the name.

Mac bulk file rename utility