We often encounter situations, where a large number of files should be copied or renamed or moved or something like that.
This can be done on the Linux command line, but it should be possible in almost the same way on the Unix/Linux/Cygwin-command line of newer MS-Windows or MacOS-X.
Now people routinely do that and they have developed several ways of doing it, which are all valid and useful.
I will show how I do things like that. It works and it is not the only way to do it.
So in the most simple case, all files in a directory ending in ‚.a‘ should be renamed to ‚.b‘.
What I do is:
ls *.a \
|perl -p -e 'chomp;$x = $_;s/\.a$/.b/;$y = $_; s/.+/mv $x $y\n/;' \
|egrep '^mv '\
|sh
You can run it without the last |sh, to check if it really does what you want.
So I use the files as input to a short perl script and create shell commands. It would be possible to do this actually in Perl itself, without piping it into a shell:
ls *.b \
|perl -n -e 'chomp;$x = $_;s/\.b$/.c/;$y=$_;rename $x, $y;'
You could also read the directory from perl, it is quite easy, but for just quickly doing stuff, I prefer getting the input from some ls.
To go into sub directories, you can use find:
find . -name '*.c' -type f -print \
| perl -n -e 'chomp;$x = $_;s/\.c$/.d/;$y=$_;rename $x, $y;'
a
You can also rename all the files that contain a certain string:
find . -name '*.html' -type f -print \
|xargs egrep -l form \
|perl -n -e 'chomp; $x=$_;s/\.html$/.form/;$y=$_;rename $x, $y;'
So you can combine with all kinds of shell commands and do really a lot of things in one line.
Of course you can use Raku, Ruby, Python or your favorite scripting language instead, as long as it allows some simple pattern matching and an efficient implicit iteration over the lines.
For such simple tasks there are also ways to do it directly in the shell like this
for f in *.d ; do mv $f `basename $f .d`.e; done
And you can always use sed, possibly in conjunction with awk instead of perl for such simple tasks.
Another approach is to just pipe the files into an texteditor that is powerful enough and create a one time script using powerful editing commands.
On Linux and Unix servers we almost always use vi, even people like me, who prefer Emacs on their own computer:
ls *.e > tmpscript
vi tmpscript
and then in vi
:0,$s/\(.*\)\(.e\)$/mv \1\2 \1.f/
ZZ
and then
sh tmpscript
rm tmpscript
So, there are many ways to achieve this goal and they are flexible and powerful enough to do really a lot more than just such simple pattern renaming.
If you work in a team and put these things into scripts, it might be necessary to follow a team policy about which scripting languages are preferred and which patterns are preferred. And you need to know the stuff that you write yourself, but also the stuff that your colleagues write.
Please, do not do
mv *.a *.b
It won’t work for good reasons.
On Linux and Unix systems the shell (usually bash) expands the glob expression (the stuff with the stars) into a list of strings and then starts mv with these strings a parameters. So calling mv with some file names ending in .a and .b, mv cannot have any idea what to do. When called with more than two parameters, the last one needs to be a directory where to move the stuff, so usually it will just refuse to work.
