In computing, rename refers to the altering of a name of a file. This can be done manually by using a shell command such as

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or mv, or by using batch renaming software that can automate the renaming process.

Implementations

The C standard library provides a function called ''rename'' which does this action. In

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming inte ...

, which is extended from the C standard, the ''rename'' function will fail if the old and new names are on different mounted

file system In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one lar ...

s. In SQL, renames are performed by using the CHANGE specification in ALTER TABLE statements.

Atomic rename

, a successful call to ''rename'' is guaranteed to have been atomic from the point of view of the current host (i.e., another program would only see the file with the old name or the file with the new name, not both or neither of them). This aspect is often used during a file save operation to avoid any possibility of the file contents being lost if the save operation is interrupted. The ''rename'' function from the C library in

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does not implement the POSIX atomic behaviour; instead it fails if the destination file already exists. However, other calls in the

Windows API The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is Microsoft's core set of application programming interfaces (APIs) available in the Microsoft Windows operating systems. The name Windows API collectively refers to several different platform implementations ...

do implement the atomic behaviour.

References

{{Computing-stub Computing terminology