Adventures in Shell Scripting | Hacker News Reader

Adventures in Shell Scripting

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4 pointsbillswift10 comments

Of course, for the given question you can simply do:

    rename oldname newname *

or, for other unix-like systems/flavors

    rename "s/oldname/newname/" oldname.*

Thanks, I've been using Linux for 13 years now and didn't even know the rename command existed; I was taught to use mv to rename files.

I've been using Unix/Linux for nearly 20 years, and I stumbled across the "rename" command about 5 years ago when I was regularly using 5 different operating systems. I typed "rename" and wondered why it didn't do what I expected. I had intended "mv".

Don't confuse them. I used the difference to learn more precisely what happens in a filing system when you do a "mv" as compared with a "rename". It was interesting.

I've since forgotten most of the details, but it occasionally proves useful.

This is a minor script, even I was doing this sort of stuff ten years ago, but this is the sort of stuff I would like to see more of. So my question, and primary reason for posting this, is: what web sites and aggregators do you know where this kind of stuff, interesting scripts and even functions, is posted? Most of the more formal sites like CPAN for perl are a pain for just browsing to learn new tricks and ideas.

Check out http://www.commandlinefu.com/

Thanks, I had actually seen this site before, but it was one of the many I lost track of when my hard-disk controller died a couple years ago. It went goofy before it died and scrambled a lot of stuff on my hard drive so I couldn't recover it when I got a new computer.

EDIT: I'm not a total idiot, I was backing up most of my files, but I often forgot to back up my favorites list.

http://www.shelldorado.com/

http://stackoverflow.com and http://serverfault.com/ have good shell scripting discussions

    autoload zmv
    zmv 'oldname.*' 'newname.$1'

If this is an adventure, driving to McDonalds is an epic journey.

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