I had a request to rename roughly 100 libraries in our SharePoint deployment recently and thought it would be a good time to dig into a bit of PowerShell.

In this post I’ll demonstrate how to loop through site collections, subsites, lists and finally how to filter and change a name of a list and I’ll also attempt to show a few interesting properties we can change.

The Code

For those of you just looking for a quick bit of code to use, this will loop through all lists excluding anything in the ‘personal’ directories and will then rename the lists as specified in the $newLibraryname variable. Feel free to use this code however you want.

Be sure to change the Variables at the top as required –

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell

# Variables
$libraryNames = "Current Name"
$newLibraryName = "New Name"
$siteCollection = "https://domain"
$exlusions = "/personal/"

# Get the Site Collection
$Site = Get-SPSite $siteCollection
$spWebApp = $Site.WebApplication

foreach ($allSites in $spWebApp.Sites) {
    if (!$exclusions -contains $allSites.Url) { #exclude sites who's url matches an exlusion
        foreach ($Web in $allSites.AllWebs) { # loop through all sites
            foreach ($list in $Web.Lists) { # loop through every list in sites
                if($libraryNames -contains $list.Title) { # if library name matches a value in $librarynames array
                    $list.ParentWeb.Url + "/" + $list.RootFolder.Url # display link to list
                    $list.Title = $newLibraryname # Update the name of list
                    $list.Update() # Update the list name in SharePoint
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Useful List Variables

Here’s a very short list of useful variables attached to lists which can be used to update options –

• $list.ForceCheckout – Returns $True or $False depending on whether Force Check out is enabled.
• $list.EnableModeration – Returns $True or $False depending on whether ‘Require content approval for submitted items’ is enabled.
• $list.AllowDeletion – Returns $True if the list can be deleted otherwise set to false to protect a list.
• $list.EnableFolderCreation – Returns $True of $False depending on whether folders can be created.
• $list.EnableVersioning – Returns $True of $False depending on whether versioning is enabled. I plan to write another short article on configuring this properly.

Hope this helps!