I often find myself doing this sort of thing with the system command, but it's probably better to do it with movefile.
Suppose your files are in C:\myfiles
filepath='C:\myfiles'
movefile(fullfile(filepath, '323A23.png'), fullfile(filepath, '1.png'));
Of course you probably want to loop over many files. A pro tip is, before you rename all of your files to something that you didn't intend, have a look at what the code will do with a disp:
filelist=dir(fullfile(filepath, '*.png'));
for i = 1:numel(filelist)
oldname = filelist(i).name;
newname = [num2str(i) '.png']; % can also do newname = string(i) + ".png";
fprintf('will rename %s to %s\n'); %check these before running with the next line uncommented
%movefile(fullfile(filepath, oldname), fullfile(filepath, newname));
end
The system version of this just amounts to passing in the same text that you'd put into the shell, e.g. in windows it's something like:
system(['rename "' fullfile(filepath, oldname) '" "' fullfile(filepath, newname) '"'])
but it's easy to mess up the quotes which you need for file names that contain spaces, so I think movefile is probably better, and it will also be multi-platform!
