Changing file names

[budugulo]

Suppose I have many PDF files in ./reports, where all the file names start with my-report then date. For example, my-report-20200901.pdf.

1. How do I replace my-report with doc e.g. my-report-20200901.pdf will become doc-20200901.pdf?
2. How do I keep dates only i.e. file name would be 20200901.pdf

[cderv]

You could be interested in fs for file manipulation.

Cross-Platform File System Operations Based on libuv

There should be a renaming function.

You can use regex with grep or gsub, or stringr to do the file replacement; stringr::str_replace or stringr::str_remove for example

This should be what is needed for this kind of task.

[elmstedt]

Here is a solution which should work cross-platform.

old <- dir("./reports",
           "my-report.*\\.pdf",
           full.names = TRUE,
           ignore.case = TRUE)
file.rename(old, gsub("my-report", "doc", old))