How to make a reference to what was matched in glob pattern

Question

With regexes you can put a capturing group and refer to it in your action (i.e. \1). Is there something similar for when glob is used in bash?

Say I have files named 'file1', 'file2', 'file3', and I want to rename them to 'foo1', 'foo2', 'foo3'. I'd like to do something like this:

mv file(?) foo\1

is that possible?

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

3

You're looking for batch renaming. There are a lot of solutions here on stackoverflow. Here is one example

edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

Community

answered Dec 01 '11 at 06:37

james

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 01 '11 at 16:09

1

One solution for this particular problem:

for i in `ls | egrep "^file[0-9]?$"`; do mv $i ${i/file/ foo}; done

answered Dec 01 '11 at 16:09

Christopher

Thanks, similar to the link in the marked answer, and 'ls | egrep PATTERN' is useful when you need the power of regex to list the files you want to affect. – initlaunch Dec 01 '11 at 19:07

2 Answers2