[wplug] Slightly off topic...shell script

[Eric C. Cooper]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 02:11:24PM -0800, Dileep Vangasseri wrote:
> I have a set of files having names which has
> characters --- in between (like foo---test--to.txt). I
> want to replace '---' with a '-' (single dash). Can
> anyone suggest a script which would make my life
> simple?
> 
> I tried:
> 
> for i in *.txt; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr '---' '-'`;
> done

On Debian, at least, the standard Perl package contains the
"rename" command.  With it, you can do

$ rename 's/---/-/g' *.txt

as well as much fancier things, since the first arg is an arbitrary
Perl expression.

-- 
Eric C. Cooper          e c c @ c m u . e d u