PowerShell script to change the names of all files in a folder

Question

I want to write a script that will change the names of all the files in a directory to something uniform.

Example: existing files: awff.jpg, forp.jpg, ddd.jpg, www.jpg

files after script: file1, file2, file3, file4.jpg

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So if i have a directory full of files, i want to run the script, i assume it will pull the contents of the directory into and array, then iterate through a loop applying the new name with the iterator appended to the end of it.

Does PowerShell have the ability to do this?

This gets me close but i want to just grab all the files, and rename them all in iterative order.

Get-ChildItem -Filter "*current*" -Recurse | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace ‘current’,’old’ }

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or this:

Get-ChildItem -LiteralPath 'C:\temp' -Recurse | Where-Object {-Not $_.PsIscontainer -AND $_.name -match "."} | 
foreach {
$New=$_.BaseName.Replace("*","File")+$_.Extension
Rename-Item -path $_.Fullname -newname $New -passthru
}

Answer 1

While PowerShell itself understands typographic quotes,
I'd avoid them due to issues in edge cases with encodings.

Your description and code do not match, do you want to rename all jpg files (recursively) with the prefix file and a counter, or just parts of the names?

$Counter = 1
Get-ChildItem -Filter "*.jpg" -Recurse | 
 Rename-Item -NewName {'file{0:D3}.jpg' -f $script:Counter++} -WhatIf

In a folder:

> Get-ChildItem *.jpg -Name
awff.jpg
ddd.jpg
forp.jpg
www.jpg

the above script would yield (in my German locale windows):

WhatIf: Ausführen des Vorgangs "Datei umbenennen" für das Ziel 
"Element: A:\awff.jpg Ziel: A:\file001.jpg".
WhatIf: Ausführen des Vorgangs "Datei umbenennen" für das Ziel 
"Element: A:\ddd.jpg Ziel: A:\file002.jpg".
WhatIf: Ausführen des Vorgangs "Datei umbenennen" für das Ziel 
"Element: A:\forp.jpg Ziel: A:\file003.jpg".
WhatIf: Ausführen des Vorgangs "Datei umbenennen" für das Ziel 
"Element: A:\www.jpg Ziel: A:\file004.jpg".

If the output pooks OK, remove the -WhatIf