On Tue, 18 May 2004, Drew Tomlinson wrote: > OK, thanks. I'm using tcsh but I think I figure out how to do it > following your example. So a "script" is the only way to do it in > *nix? Being born and raised on MS-DOS, I'm accustomed to the "copy bac* > bac*.old" syntax.
It has to do with shell globbing. The bac* parameter is expanded to a list of all files matching that pattern, then fed to the command. So if you type 'cp bac* bac*.old' in a Unix shell and your directory has files bac1, bac2, bac3, and bac4, what it actually tries to execute is: cp bac1 bac2 bac3 bac4 Note that bac*.old didn't evaluate to anything: there aren't any files or directories that match that pattern. So cp gives an error-- it'll copy multiple files to a directory, but only if the last parameter is a directory. There are numerous recipes for doing the batch move-and-rename. The O'Reilly Unix Power Tools book (highly recommended) has a script that pipes the output of ls into sed, generating a bunch of individual mv commands. You can do the same thing with find, or Perl, or other things. -Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
