Removing suffix from column names using rename_all?

Using new dplyr:

df %>% rename_with(~str_remove(., '.mean'))

If you want to use the dplyr package, I'd recommend using the rename_at function.

Dframe <- data.frame(var1.mean = rnorm(10),
                     var2.mean = rnorm(10),
                     var1.sd = runif(10))

library(dplyr)

Dframe %>% 
  rename_at(.vars = vars(ends_with(".mean")),
            .funs = funs(sub("[.]mean$", "", .)))

We can use rename_all

df1 %>%
   rename_all(.funs = funs(sub("\\..*", "", names(df1)))) %>%
   head(2)
#        var1        var2       var3       var1       var2       var3
#1 -0.5458808 -0.09411013  0.5266526 -1.3546636 0.08314367  0.5916817
#2  0.5365853 -0.08554095 -1.0736261 -0.9608088 2.78494703 -0.2883407

NOTE: If the column names are duplicated, it needs to be made unique with make.unique

data

set.seed(24)
df1 <- as.data.frame(matrix(rnorm(25*6), 25, 6, dimnames = list(NULL,
             paste0(paste0("var", 1:3), rep(c(".mean", ".sd"), each = 3)))))