| Art Alexion on 9 Sep 2005 14:20:32 -0000 |
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Thomas Thurman wrote: >Art Alexion said: > > >>in dos if I wanted to rename a batch of files i a directory, I could do >> >> move (or rn) ??.txt 61??.txt >> >>and it would rename all of the two character-named text files to prepend >>61. Bash won't let me do this as >> >> mv ??.txt 61??.txt >> >> > >The reason this doesn't work is the way wildcards are expanded in the >shell. Suppose you have aa.txt, bb.txt and cc.txt in the current >directory. Then in > > mv ??.txt 61??.txt > >the "??.txt" gets expanded to the names of all the files it matches, i.e. >"aa.txt bb.txt cc.txt", but the "61??.txt" doesn't match any files in the >current directory, so it ends up as an empty string. So what mv finally >sees is: > > mv aa.txt bb.txt cc.txt > >hence your error about "target must be a directory". > > > >>Is there a command that will let me do this? >> >> > >It's not in all installations, but you might find that you have Larry >Wall's "rename" command available. It takes a regular expression and a set >of filenames. So in your case you'd write > > rename 's/^/61/' ??.txt > > > I didn't realize, but I do have "rename". I will have to keep my perl expression reference open until I get used to it. Thanks. -- _______________________________________ Art Alexion Arthur S. Alexion LLC arthur [at] alexion [dot] com aim: aalexion sms: 2679725536 [at] messaging [dot] sprintpcs [dot] com PGP fingerprint: 52A4 B10C AA73 096F A661 92D2 3B65 8EAC ACC5 BA7A The attachment -- signature.asc -- is my electronic signature; no need for alarm. Info @ http://mysite.verizon.net/art.alexion/encryption/signature.asc.what.html Key for signed PDFs available at http://mysite.verizon.net/art.alexion/encryption/ArthurSAlexion.p7c The validation string is TTJY-ZILJ-BJJG. ________________________________________ Attachment:
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