The usually so called shapefiles are typically not files but a couple of them with different extensions. Thus it is not very convenient to rename them.

Fortunately a Unix Shell is a very powerful tool so here comes shpmv which is a simple bash shell function. Just put it in your .bashrc. It works fine regardless if an extension (e.g. .shp) is given or not.

function shpmv() {
  if [ $# -ne 2 ]; then
    echo "shpmv: rename shapefiles"
    echo "usage: shpmv  "
    return
  fi
  src="${1%.*}"
  tgt="${2%.*}"
  if ! [ -f $src.shp ]; then
    echo "$src.shp: file not found"   
    return  
  fi
  for f in $src.*; do
    ext="${f##*.}"      
    mv $f $tgt.$ext
  done  
}