tns1 wrote: > I ended up using make to do the job since I am compiling now anyway. > This is under cygwin and I don't want to install another 5MB just to > rename some files. > > I am really surprised it can't be done easily with cp, since with DOS > its just copy *.c *.o.
The paradigm used by Unix-like systems is different than used by DOS-like system. While the DOS copy command may make this particular task easy the Unix shell makes other things easy. On DOS the commands receive those wildcards "*.c" and "*.o" as arguments and do the filename matching within the program. But on Unix the command line shell expands those into file names and populate the program argument array with expanded versions of the command prior to handing it to the program. For example one of the alternatives to using perl 'rename' script would be to use the shell to loop over the files and rename them in a loop. for f in *.a; do mv -v "$f" "${f%.a}.b" ; done Or perhaps even this: for f in *.a; do echo mv "$f" "${f%.a}.b" ; done | sh -x Bob