18.13 One More Way to Do It

I couldn't resist throwing my hat into this ring. I can imagine an unsophisticated user who might not trust himself to replace one pattern with another, but doesn't want to repeat a long list of mv commands. Here's a simple script (1.5 ) that takes a list of filenames (perhaps provided by wildcards) as input, and prompts the user for a new name for each file:

-n
 

#!/bin/sh
# Usage: newname files
for x 
do
    echo -n "old name is $x, new name is: "
    read newname
    mv "$x" "$newname"
done

For example:

touch
 

% touch junk1 junk2 junk3


% newname junk*



old name is junk1, new name is: test1


old name is junk2, new name is: test2


old name is junk3, new name is: test3

This script is so simple, it's not included on the disc. I just thought I'd throw it in to demonstrate that there's more than one way to do it, even if you aren't using Perl (18.10 ) .