Is there an easy way to rename many files at once?

Factual Questions
1

I need to change a few letters in the names of about 400 files. I tried the ren command in DOS, but that shortened the names too. I looked for information on Google, and found out that this would have been an easy task if I had WindowsXP, but I have Windows95. Is there some sort of dos command that changes the same few letters in the name, but doesn’t shorten it? Any help would be appreciated, I feel like my hand is going to fall off if I renumber any more of these by hand.

2

Could you give an example of both a before and after name? That would make it easier to test ideas.

3

Yep, try download.com search for ‘rename’ youll find plenty of programs to do this for you.

4

Let’s say your files are named:

abc001.txt
abc002.txt
.
.
.
abc400.txt

and you want them to be:

xyz001.txt
xyz002.txt
.
.
.
xyz400.txt

Then from a DOS prompt, in that directory,

rename abc.txt xyz.txt**

Is that what you need?

5

If you are good with a text editor, you can use a batch file:

list the files and stuff them into say foo.bat

edit the lines of the file so they say something like

ren oldname.foo newname.goo

then execute the bat file.

I’d give more details on how I do this but I use unix-under-dos
commands which you probably don’t have. (If fact, this is quite
easy using cygwin .)

6

I’m mainly a Mac person, so don’t make fun of me if I get this wrong, but I think you can rename PC files with DOS commands and retain / use long file names by using quotation marks. (Also allows you to use spaces in file names).