Help with bash command to change lots of file names

[Peter McGarvey]

On Friday 10 May 2002 14:24 pm, Frank Shute wrote:
> On Fri, May 10, 2002 at 02:17:49AM +0100, I wrote:
> > On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 11:25:42PM +0100, greadey wrote:
> > >     Hi peeps,
> > >
> > > I have a directory with lots of files called CHAPN.TXT where n is a
> > > number from 1 to 14.  I want to turn them all into latex files and
> > > so for ease of editing in Vim I want to change them all to chN.tex. 
> > > I have been trying to write a bash command to do it with a for loop
> > > and sed and I basically have;
> > >
> > > for f in *
> > > do
> > > NEW=`echo $f | sed -e 's/CHAP \( \W+ \. \) /ch \1 tex/ ' ` # I've
> > > put whitespace in for clarity
> > > #mv $f $NEW
> > > echo $NEW
> > > done
> > >
> > > I have tried different quotes and I believe my regexp is correct but
> > > when I run this command or any variation I either get an error if I
> > > use all single quotes instead of backticks and single quotes or the
> > > command just prints all the original file names.
> > >
> > > Can someone tell me where I am going wrong?
> > >
> > > Thanks in advance
> > >
> > > greadey.
> >
> > I'm not wildly keen on your regex & I prefer brackets to backticks
> > (more legible!). Try:
> >
> > NEW=$(echo $f | sed -e 's/CHAP\([1-9]*\)\.TXT/ch\1\.tex/')
> >
> > Works OK with /bin/sh (I think...) don't know about bash.
>
> I fouled up of course and I'd probably write the whole thing as:
>
> TARGET=$(ls -1 | grep 'CHAP[0-9]*.TXT')
> for filename in $TARGET
> do
> NEW=$(echo $filename | sed -e 's/foo\([0-9]*\)\.txt/bogus\1\.tex/')
> #mv $filename $NEW
> echo $NEW
> done
>
> Probably wrong again;) and if I had a choice I'd use perl rather than
> shell.


Once upon a time I'd have used perl too.  But I dislike writing 1-shot 
scripts.  So I'd do it from the bash command line like this:

for f in `ls | grep CHAP.*\.TXT`; do mv -v $f `echo $f | sed 
\-e's/CHAP\(.*\)\.TXT/ch\1.tex/'`; done



-- 
TTFN, FNORD

Peter McGarvey
System Administrator
Network Operations, VIA Networks UK