How to rename many files efficiently?

I'm running Matlab 7.5.0 (R2007b) in Unix, and I would like to rename all files in a directory by appending something to the filename, e.g. "A" would become "A_1", "B" would become "B_1" etc.

Note that the original files are not mat-files, but this shouldn't make a difference.

Right now I'm doing this using a loop like this:

for i = 1 : length(FileList)
    movefile([MyDir FileList{i}] , [MyDir FileList{i} '_1']);
end

However, this is very slow. For 3500 files it takes around 15 minutes, or about 0.25 seconds per file.

Does anyone know a faster way to do this?

P.S. I've also tried executing a unix command from Matlab within the loop, of the sort '!mv ...', but that wasn't faster either.

[Matt Kindig]

It's not Matlab, but I have used this freeware program (Renamer: http://www.den4b.com/?x=products&product=renamer) for many years to do this. It is rather flexible (like it can run regexp, for example), and works well for this task. It is also rather fast on a large number of files.

[Yoel Lax]

Thanks but I need to do this from within Matlab, b/c renaming the files is only an intermediate step of a much larger script.

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

system('rename old_name new_name')

[Yoel Lax]

How is this different from

!mv oldname newname

Using your solution, I would still need to loop over all filenames, and that's going to be really slow.