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    @Cbhihe You will have to try installing both. On my (OpenBSD) system, the utility is actually called prename. I would be somewhat surprised if a name collision between the two utilities wasn't appropriately handled somehow. Commented Feb 9, 2022 at 19:32
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    I did think you were on BSD :-). I just found out that on Archlinux, installing perl-rename does preserve the default utility GNU rename. Tx. Commented Feb 9, 2022 at 21:06
  • @Cbhihe, AFAIK, there's no GNU rename. There's (a quite dumb) one in util-linux though, which might be the one installed on your system. Commented Feb 11, 2022 at 15:46
  • @StéphaneChazelas: You are (depressingly) correct on both counts: there is no specific GNU-flavored rename and the util-linux version installed by default is really "pared down" to bare bones compared to perl-rename. Instead the nifty regex based in-place substitution capability of perl-rename blew me away. perl rules ! (at least sometimes). Commented Feb 11, 2022 at 16:22
  • @Cbhihe, yes even the original rename from 33 years ago written as 10 lines of perl code was infinitely better than util-linux's (itself added around 2000 in 2.10e, annoying many Linux users at the time when some distributions started including it) Commented Feb 11, 2022 at 17:07