Question

I have a directory which has 5 files named like this

A.abcd (1).txt
B.abcd (1).txt
C.abcd (1).txt
D.abcd (1).txt
E.abcd (1).txt

I want to change the names of the file so that they should become like this :

A.defg.txt
B.defg.txt
C.defg.txt
D.defg.txt
E.defg.txt

In short I want to change abcd (1) to defg in the files.

I tried to run the system command from the R console.

system("mv A.abcd (1).txt A.defg.txt")

But I have to do this one by one.

Is there any way I can do it in one shot through R ??

Answer 1

You can use file.rename() to rename files. And use sub with a regular expression for the text manipulation.

x <- c("A.abcd (1).txt", "B.abcd (1).txt", "C.abcd (1).txt", "D.abcd (1).txt", "E.abcd (1).txt")
newx <- sub("abcd \\(1\\)", "defg", x)
newx
[1] "A.defg.txt" "B.defg.txt" "C.defg.txt" "D.defg.txt" "E.defg.txt"


## The following is untested
file.rename(x, newx)

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See ?files for help on this and the other base R file manipulation functions.