Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

The shell remains one of the most powerful tools on a computer system — yet a large number of users are unaware of how much one can accomplish with it. Using a combination of simple commands, we will see how to solve complex problems in day to day computer usage.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition will take you through useful real-world recipes designed to make your daily life easy when working with the shell. The book shows the reader how to effectively use the shell to accomplish complex tasks with ease.The book discusses basics of using the shell, general commands and proceeds to show the reader how to use them to perform complex tasks with ease.Starting with the basics of the shell, we will learn simple commands with their usages allowing us to perform operations on files of different kind. The book then proceeds to explain text processing, web interaction and concludes with backups, monitoring and other sysadmin tasks.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition serves as an excellent guide to solving day to day problems using the shell and few powerful commands together to create solutions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Renaming and moving files in bulk


Renaming a number of files is one of the tasks we frequently come across. A simple example is when you download photos from your digital camera to your computer you may delete unnecessary files and it causes discontinuous numbering of image files. Sometimes, you may need to rename them with a custom prefix and continuous numbering for filenames. We sometimes use third-party tools for performing rename operations. We can use Bash commands to perform a rename operation in a couple of seconds.

Moving all the files having a particular substring in their filenames (for example, the same prefix for filenames) or with a specific file type to a given directory is another use case we frequently perform. Let's see how to write scripts to perform these kinds of operations.

Getting ready

The rename command helps to change filenames using Perl regular expressions. By combining the commands find, rename, and mv, we can perform a lot of things.

How to do it...

The easiest way...