I’ve never really used rename. It has different features compared to mv, though. rename has more options for batch renaming such as regular expression support, though the behavior varies by distro.

You can do that with the find command. Also xargs is a good one to know for stuff like this, but when commands have the capacity to work on a list already like find, you don’t need xargs. You can use find -exec rename -n with a regex perhaps. I’m not a linux system currently and can’t test a snippet, but I’ll check back later if the question is still open.

OP does understand that. They’re rhetorical questions.