I am constantly amazed at the tricks little old Puppy can do. For instance batch editing filenames can be done very simply with ROX. Just select more than one file in a directory (select them all with ctrl+A, or just a few with ctrl+left-click), then right-click the selected files and choose Rename from the ROX menu. Up will pop a ROX window with places where you type the character(s) you want to replace, and the character(s) you want to replace them with. Next, click Apply to see if you get what you expected, before clicking Rename at the bottom of the window to execute the change.
That's all there is to it!