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On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 8:06 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: Nope. ?The binary 'rename' command (not the Perl script) ?takes N args, the first is what string to look for in a filename, the second string is what to replace it with, and 3-N are filenames to change (including a list generated by the shell expanding a wildcard). ?It's not recursive, so if you wanted to change multiple occurrences of the search string, you'd have to run the command multiple times. ?This wouldn't affect your example of changing a dot and a three-letter extension. The manpage summary lists the command as "rename from to file", if that helps. ?In general, because of wildcard expansion by the shell, UNIX commands (like "grep" to use a more common example) put fixed args first and filenames last. ?You can know, in the case of grep, that you have one string argument for a regular expression to search for, then a random-length list of files to search for it in. ?For 'rename', it's two fixed arguments and a random-length list of filenames to apply those arguments to. I had thought that 'rename' was only a RedHat/CentOS command, and in a literal sense, it is. ?Under Debian-flavored distros, it's called 'rename.ul' (presumably to avoid conflicting with the "other" rename). ?It's part of the util-linux package so it's optional and may or may not be on a given box depending on what packages you've installed. ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/

I'm not going to attempt to claim UNIX (and by way of inheritance, Linux) isn't confusing, but I ran across it when my experience up to that time was largely on the Commodore PET, C-64, and VAX/VMS. ?I had the same steep "learning cliff" as everyone else, but perhaps since I started off as a programmer, I'm more of the target audience for it than some.