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

ren Ren or REN may refer to: Abbreviations * Orenburg Tsentralny Airport, IATA code REN, civil airport in Russia * Redes Energéticas Nacionais (REN), Portuguese company * Renanthera, abbreviated as Ren, orchid genus * Ringer equivalence number ( ...

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

Implementations

The

C standard library The C standard library or libc is the standard library for the C programming language, as specified in the ISO C standard.ISO/IEC (2018). '' ISO/IEC 9899:2018(E): Programming Languages - C §7'' Starting from the original ANSI C standard, it wa ...

provides a function called ''rename'' which does this action. In POSIX, 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 larg ...

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

Atomic rename

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

References

{{Computing-stub Computing terminology