change file names

[Steven W. Orr]

On Tuesday, Feb 21st 2006 at 10:39 -0500, quoth Tom Buskey:

=>I've been using this perl script for a few years.  I got it from UGU's daily
=>scripts.
=>
=>ren 's/exp1/exp2/' *txt
=>
=>It has some error checking so it won't overwrite existing files.  Most
=>scripts I've seen for renaming don't do that because they're quick hacks for
=>a special case.
=>

This script is a slightly shameless ripoff of the rename script in the 
camel book:

#!/usr/bin/perl
$op = shift;
for (@ARGV) {
    $was = $_;
    eval $op;
    die $@ if $@;
    rename($was,$_) unless $was eq $_;
}

To elaborate further, both of these are cool because you get access to all 
of perl's regexp capabilities. e.g., (besides the one above)

rename 'tr/A-Z/a-z/' $filelist 

to take a bunch of DOS filenames and flip them all to lowercase.

-- 
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