If you have a group of files whose names end with .new and you want to rename them to end with .old , this won't work:
%mv *.new *.old
Wrong !
because
the shell can't match
*.old
(
1.18
)
,
and because the
mv
command just doesn't work that way. Here's how to do it:
-d \(..\)..\1 |
%
|
---|
That outputs a series of mv commands, one per file, and pipes them to a shell. The quotes help make sure that special characters ( 8.19 ) aren't touched by the shell - this isn't always needed, but it's a good idea if you aren't sure what files you'll be renaming:
mv 'afile.new' 'afile.old' mv 'bfile.new' 'bfile.old' ...
(To see the commands that will be generated rather than executing them, leave off the
|
sh
or use
sh -v
(
8.17
)
.) To copy, change
mv
to
cp
. For safety, use
mv -i
or
cp -i
if your versions have the
-i
options (
21.11
)
.
This method works for any UNIX command that takes a pair of filenames. For instance, to compare a set of files in the current directory with the original files in the /usr/local/src directory, use diff ( 28.1 ) :
%ls -d *.c *.h | sed 's@.*@diff -c & /usr/local/src/&@' | sh
-