change file names

Jon maddog Hall maddog at li.org
Tue Feb 21 10:50:01 EST 2006


drew.vanzandt at gmail.com said:
> (That was years ago, of course.  Haven't we all reinvented the wheel a few
> times?)

(sigh)

This is why I really miss the printed man pages.

When I was first learning Unix (and you really DON'T want to learn how long
ago that was, although I will bet there are people on the list who used it
before I did) I was sitting one night with a problem much like the one that
Zhao gave us.

Like Drew, I was thinking of having to write some program, but by then I had
been doing shell scripting long enough that I thought to myself:

   "I do not KNOW that there is a command in Unix that will do this.....
    .....but I am willing to BET that there is."

And I backed up my bet by going through section one of the manual (the commands
section) until I found what I needed for THAT problem, "cut" and "paste".

It brought my job down from hours (or maybe days) to minutes.



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