Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!philmds!leo
From: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Need a file renaming facility
Keywords: sed,filename conversion
Message-ID: <485@philmds.UUCP>
Date: 20 May 88 11:05:26 GMT
References: <13840@brl-adm.ARPA> <2956@ea.ecn.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: leo@philmds.UUCP (L.J.M. de Wit)
Organization: Philips I&E DTS Eindhoven
Lines: 44

In article <2956@ea.ecn.purdue.edu> davy@ea.ecn.purdue.edu.UUCP (Dave Curry) writes:
> ...[stuff deleted]...
>>>Try:
>>>    foo% foreach i ( `ls *.pre  sed 's/.pre$//'` )
>>>    ? echo "Moving ${i}..."
>>>    ? mv ${i}.pre $i
>>>    ? end
> ...[stuff deleted about someone using basename each time in the loop]...
>
>If you're going for speed, then forking and execing basename for every
>file name is certainly not the solution.  I suspect for any number of
>files greater than 3 or 4, the ls/sed answer is faster.
> ...[further discussion using csh features]...

I agree about not using basename inside the loop (besides, sed is not that
big and you use it only once), but still like the sed solution more;
it is more flexible and more 'Un*x-style': let each tool do it's own dedicated
job. Sed is good at conversions. I used a similar construct to rename
VMS (have to clean my mouth now 8-) filenames to Un*x filenames, i.e.
lowercase conversion, version stripping. Sed can do just that, e.g.

------------- Start Here -------------
#!/bin/sh

set `ls *\;* 2>/dev/null |sed '
p
s/\([^ 	]*\);[0-9]*/\1/
y/ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz/'`

# The positional parameters now are: oldname1 newname1 oldname2 newname2 etc.

while :
do
	case $# in
	0) exit 0;;
	esac
	mv $1 $2
	shift; shift
done
------------- End Here -------------

and you can do all other kinds of conversions, too.

        Leo.