Renaming multiple files in Powershell

So I ran into an issue today where I was given some MSSQL database backup files that were prefixed and suffixed with values that were not appropriate for their final use. Instead of hand renaming each file I decided to try and flex my Powershell muscles… here’s the result

ls *.bak | foreach { rename-item $_ -newname ([regex]::Replace($_.name, "prefix(\w+)suffix", '$1', "IgnoreCase")) }

The first step is to select the files we want to rename. In this example it was done using the ls cmdlet with a file extension file. The results of this are then put through the foreach cmdlet. Which in this case has a function defined that each result is passed into which in turn calls the rename-item cmdlet.