Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!snorkelwacker!ira.uka.de!fuchs
From: fuchs@it.uka.de (Harald Fuchs)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: [] in Unix filenames
Message-ID: <fuchs.653786109@tmipm0>
Date: 19 Sep 90 23:15:09 GMT
References: <9009191420.AA10971@thep.lu.se>
Sender: news@ira.uka.de (USENET News System)
Organization: University of Karlsruhe, FRG
Lines: 41

magnus@THEP.LU.SE (Magnus Olsson) writes:
>OK, I thought, I;ll just use the mved script published here some time
>ago and do

>mved \[*\]= =

>(the = is a special wildcard recognized by mved - the command would mean
>the same as
>mv \[.subdir\]file1 file1
>etc.)

>But to my surprise, the shell just said "[: no such file or directory".

>Actually, I couldn't find out *any* combination of backslashes and or quotes
>that enabled me to get what I wanted (what [*] would have meant if [] weren't
>special characters).

>Finally, I gave up and wrote a C program to do the job.

I use a tool called 'rename' for tasks like this:
   rename 's/\[\.subdir\]//' \[*

And here's 'rename':

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
$0 =~ s:.*/::;
die "Usage: $0 action file...\n" unless $#ARGV > 0;
$op = shift;
for (@ARGV) {
  $was = $_;
  eval $op;
  die $@ if $@;
  if ($was ne $_) {
    rename ($was, $_) || die "$0: can't rename $was to $_: $!\n";
  }
}

What? You don't have perl? Ask your next friendly FTP site...
--

Harald Fuchs <fuchs@it.uka.de>