simple question about mv

[James Logan III]

In article <18217 at adm.BRL.MIL> DEG41560 at ua1vm.ua.edu (Rob Smith) writes:
#  I know this is simple, but then again, so am I.  What if I want to mv a bunch
# of files with the same suffix to another suffix. The following does not
# work
# 
#     mv *.flip *.flop
# 
# what does?  I'm under Ultrix 2.2.  I'm doing it by hand, but I'd like to
# be able to do wild card renames, ala DOS.

You will have to do this with a "for" loop.  If you are using the
Bourne or the Korn shell, you can use the following loop.  If you're
using the C shell, you're on your own.

for FILE in *.flip; do
	NOEXTEN=`basename $FILE .flip`;
	echo $FILE ${NOEXTEN}.flop;
	mv $FILE ${NOEXTEN}.flop;
done;

I like having the echo in the above example so that if I make a
typo I can see the problem, before it's too late, and hit the
interrupt key.  

That loop can be generalized into a shell script like this one:
-------------------------------------------------------
:
#	mvex.sh		James Logan	Sun Jan 29 15:44:09 EST 1989
#		Move all files with one extension to a new extension.
#

#
# Check the parameters.
#
if test $# -ne 2; then
	echo >&2 "usage: $0 oldextension newextension";
	exit 2;
fi;

#
# These variables can be optimized out, but are used for clarity.
#
OLDEXTENSION=$1;
NEWEXTENSION=$2;

#
# Move each file one at a time.
#
for FILE in *$OLDEXTENSION; do
	NOEXTEN=`basename $FILE $OLDEXTENSION`;
	mv $FILE ${NOEXTEN}${NEWEXTENSION};
done;

exit 0;
-------------------------------------------------------

			-Jim

-- 
Jim Logan                           logan at vsedev.vse.com
VSE Software Development Lab        uucp:  ..!uunet!vsedev!logan
(703) 418-0002                      inet:  logan%vsedev.vse.com at uunet.uu.net