This is a resend from a reply to a thread titled "sed or awk or ?"
There are few ways to do this, but here is one. It is not particularly
elegant; just a brute force way of doing it.
But it does have the advantage of letting you test whether and how it will
work by uncommenting the "print" statement and commenting out the "system".
You can see if running the program does what you really want it to do and
make changes before you go mucking about with the real mv command.
In this case person asking for help wanted to rename files named
"process....." to "adi.....".
Trying this out will introduce you to gawk and regular expressions. Really
cool stuff.
I'm pretty sure you could do this directly in bash, but I'm not particularly
strong there.
/Pen
------------------------------------------
Create the following awk file named, say, "doit.awk" using your favorite
editor. Do this in, say, your home directory.
{
if (/^processed/)
{
new = $1
gsub(/^processed/, "adi", new)
syscmd = "mv " $1 " " $new
# print syscmd
system(syscmd)
}
}
In the directory that you want to change the filenames, execute the command
ls -1 > myfiles
Now do the following command
gawk -f ~/doit.awk myfiles
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