Prefixing Files in a Directory Under Linux

Last week, I needed to prefix all files in a directory with a given string. A real-world example would be to say you have to move all your source files to "backup-{filename}.cpp" or something to that effect. One could run mv file1.cpp backup-file1.cpp``mv file2.cpp backup-file2.cpp ... mv filen.cpp backup-filen.cpp, but that is very tedious and takes entirely too long. In the time I would have taken to move all the files I needed to, I created the following Bash script to do it for me: #!/bin/bash # Usage: prefix # : The string with which to prefix all the files. Required. # : A simple regex to select which files to prefix. Optional. # Note: When using patterns, if a * character is used, it needs to be # escaped. For example, to select only .txt files, use "*.txt" # instead of simply "*.txt".

PATTERN=
PREFIX=

if [ -z $1 ]
then
    echo "No prefix given! Exiting ..."
    exit 0
else
    PREFIX="$1"
fi

if [ -z $2 ]
then
    # No regex pattern given; do nothing
    echo "No pattern given; using all files in directory..."
else
    PATTERN="$2"
fi

for word in `ls ${PATTERN}`
do
    `mv "${word}" "${PREFIX}${word}"`
    echo "moved "${word}" to "${PREFIX}${word}""
done

exit 0

Copy-and-paste the following code into a /usr/bin/prefix, then chmod +x /usr/bin/prefix (as root). From there, you can call the script in the following ways: Move all .cpp files to backup-.cpp: prefix backup- *.cpp Move all files to backup-{filename} prefix backup- Move all files to "project backup-{filename}" prefix "project backup-"

This could probably be simplified into a one-line perl script, but I'll take the verbosity and readability over the leetness factor of being able to do it in a single line. That would be pretty cool, though. Perhaps a revised script is in order ...