This is my version of the script of Dierdre, which has been improved to handle files with spaces in them and recurse into the subdirectories (find is a very flexible tool for this kind of things):
[code]
find . -iname "*pattern1*" -exec echo "mv '{}' '{}'" \; | sed 's/pattern2/pattern3/2' | /bin/sh
[/code]
where:
pattern1: the mask that select which files to process
pattern2: string to be modified
pattern3: substitution for pattern2 (leave empty for deletion)

Note that, if the script has modified the folder names, you will have to replay the script for every level of recursion, since once it has changed the first level name it will no more find the nested folders.

Hi loubregand,

Your lines have been the more helpful of all that I tried. I have one question: What if I want to make the rename (sed) just on files, excluding folders or directories at all. I have tried:

find . -type f -iname "*pattern1*" -exec echo "mv '{}' '{}'" \; | sed 's/pattern2/pattern3/2' | /bin/sh

and several more permutations but with no success

something that works is to use for pattern1 somethin like "*pattern1*.*"
and this works as long as the file has an extension, if it does not have one it is not processed

Could you or someone else can help me?