How to Rename or Move Files in Python

Today we’ll see how to rename and move files in Python. Actually, it’s the same thing.

First, let’s create a new folder and name it folderA. Inside folderA let’s create another empty folder and let’s name it folderB. Let’s also create a text file in folderA and name it file1.txt.

What we need is the rename function in the os module, so let’s import the module:

import os

Now we want to rename file1.txt to newfile.txt. We need the old name (along with the full path if the file is in a different folder than the current folder) and the new name:

old = r'C:\Users\user-1\Desktop\folderA\file1.txt'
new = r'C:\Users\user-1\Desktop\folderA\newfile.txt'

Now we can use the rename method:

os.rename(old, new)

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Next let’s change the extension from .txt to .docx:

old = r'C:\Users\user-1\Desktop\folderA\newfile.txt'
new = r'C:\Users\user-1\Desktop\folderA\newfile.docx'

os.rename(old, new)

The .docx extension is used by Microsoft Word, so now we can open the file in Microsoft Word.

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Finally, let’s move the file to folderB. How to we move files? Moving a file to a folder is actually renaming the file so that the new path contains the folder we want to move the file to:

old = r'C:\Users\user-1\Desktop\folderA\newfile.docx'
new = r'C:\Users\user-1\Desktop\folderA\folderB\newfile.docx'

os.rename(old, new)

As you can see, moving and renaming files is pretty simple.

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