Option 1: Using Windows PowerShell
Open the windows menu.
Type: “PowerShell” and open the ‘Windows PowerShell’ command window.
Goto folder with desired files: e.g. cd “C:\house chores”
Notice: address must incorporate quotes “” if there are spaces involved.
You can use ‘dir’ to see all the files in the folder. Using ‘|’ will pipeline the output of ‘dir’ for the command that follows.
Notes: ‘dir’ is an alias of ‘Get-ChildItem’. See: wiki: cmdlets.
One can provide further functionality. e.g. ‘dir -recurse’ outputs all the files, folders and sub-folders.
What if I only want a range of files?
Instead of ‘dir |’ I can use:
dir | where-object -filterscript {($_.Name -ge 'DSC_20') -and ($_.Name -le 'DSC_31')} |
For batch-renaming with the directory name as a prefix:
dir | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.Directory.Name + " - " + $_.Name}
Option 2: Using Command Prompt
In the folder press shift+right-click : select ‘open command-window here’
for %a in (*.*) do ren "%a" "prefix - %a"
If there are a lot of files, it might be good to add an ‘@echo off’ command before this and an ‘echo on’ command at the end.