I found myself needing to systematically rename a bunch of files, and previously the only way I knew to do it was with a loop, passing each filename into sed, and using the output as the destination filename. Tedious and error prone!
However, it turns out that people have anticipated this use case, and there is a utility for this exact purpose, called “rename.” It allows you to provide a perl-style regular expression whose input is the existing filename found by your search expression, and whose output is what that file should be renamed. There’s even an especially useful option to take no action, but only to print out what the new filenames would be, allowing you to perform a dry-run before you rename 100000 files.
Example:
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Happy renaming!