I really like the approach of pipe-rename ( https://github.com/marcusbuffett/pipe-rename ) for renaming many files. It's especially convenient for people who can efficiently edit many lines in their favorite text editor (so everybody here, I guess). Main problem: you maybe don't do this kind of operation frequently enough to remember how it's called or how you aliased it.
$ ls / find # tweak until I have a list of things to rename
$ for file in $(ls / find...); do echo "mv $file $(echo $file | sed ... )"; done # this prints mv commands for renaming, I can inspect them as needed
$ for file in $(); do...; done | sh # execute the renaming
It is inspectable, easy to cancel (just don't pipe to shell), incremental... just needs wrangling with bash etc. which is a bit of a pain.It works for a bunch of other all-or-nothing commands, which are potentially quite destructive; use a for-loop to generate the commands, tweak until you're happy with it, then pipe to shell.