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 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug