How to rename all md files to mdx

Recently I converted my Gatsby blog from Markdown to MDX, and I wanted to convert all my .md files over to .mdx for consistency’s sake.

The folder structure of my repository looks something like this:

posts
    post-slug-one
        index.md
    post-slug-two
        index.md

Since I have over 50 posts, I didn’t want to do the renaming manually!

If you’re using VSCode, there is a Batch Rename extension you can use. However, it doesn’t seem to work when all your files are located inside of their own folders (like mine are).

I came across this snippet:

for file in *.md; do mv "$file" "${file%.md}.mdx"; done

This seems to do the trick for any files that live in the same folder.

To get all files that live underneath the posts directory, this works:

find posts -type f -name "*.md"

The solution

Putting both of the above snippets together, I came up with this:

find posts -type f -name "*.md"|while read file;
  do mv "$file" "${file%.md}.mdx";
done

Before running the script, I would recommend checking that the find command is finding all the files you expect it to. Also, make sure to stash any other changes on your repository so that you can easily reverse this operation if it goes wrong!

Comments

[bestspacejam]

More safer solution from Stack Overflow answer:

find ./posts -name '*.md' -print0 \
  | sed -z 'p;s/md$/mdx/' \
  | xargs -0rn2 mv --

Use -print0 is necessary for processing file names with newlines.

[Ben Sinclair]

On Linux, you have the rename command for this:

rename .md  .mdx *.md

You can probably get it on MacOS with a bit of homebrew hackery, but it's not the "rename" package on there as I just figured out.