On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 09:27:46AM +1100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Morning Sluggers
>
> I am having trouble with something simple which I am sure is easy. I just
> want to rename all the files in a directory from say their existing name to
> p-existingname. e.g. mv p1.fmt pp1.fmt but for all the files in a
> directory.
Try the 'rename' command, which will hopefully come bundled with
your distribution. (I think it comes standard with Perl 5.5
upward or something.) For your example:
rename 's/p/pp/' *.fmt
If you're not familiar with Perl's regular expressions, basically
what you need to do with rename is use 's/old_text/new_text' as
the first argument to the command.
rename will replace only the first occurance of that text in the
filename, so if you have a file called 'p1p.fmt', it'll get
renamed to 'pp1p.fmt', and not 'pp1pp.fmt'. One of the most
common uses you'll see rename being used for is
rename 'tr/A-Z/a-z/' *
which transliterates (tr) all upper case characters (A-Z) to
lowercase characters (a-z).
If you have a whole bunch of files you want to rename, post them
to the slug list and I'm sure many regex gurus can help you out
:).
--
#ozone/algorithm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - trust.in.love.to.save
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