Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook

By : Sarath Lakshman
Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook

By: Sarath Lakshman

Overview of this book

<p>GNU/Linux is a remarkable operating system that comes with a complete development environment that is stable, reliable, and extremely powerful. The shell being the native interface to communicate with the operating system is capable of controlling the entire operating system. There are numerous commands on Linux shell which are documented but hard to understand. The man pages are helpful but they are very lengthy and it does not give any clues on key areas where commands can be used. Proper usage of shell commands can easily solve many complex tasks with a few lines of code, but most linux users don't have the right know-how to use the Linux shell to its full potential.<br /><br />Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook is a collection of essential command-line recipes along with detailed descriptions tuned with practical applications. It covers most of the commands on Linux with a variety of usecases accompanied by plenty of examples. This book helps you to perform complex data manipulations involving tasks such as text processing, file management, backups and more with the combination of few commands.<br /><br />Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook shows you how to capitalize on all the aspects of Linux using the shell scripting language. This book teaches you how to use commands to perform simple tasks all the way to scripting complex tasks such as managing large amounts of data on a network.</p> <p>It guides you on implementing some of the most common commands in Linux with recipes that handle any of the operations or properties related with files like searching and mining inside a file with grep. It also shows you how utilities such as sed, awk, grep, cut can be combined to solve text processing related problems. The focus is on saving time by automating many activities that we perform interactively through as browser with a few lines of script.</p> <p>This book will take you from a clear problem description to a fully functional program. The recipes contained within the chapter will introduce the reader to specific problems and provide hands-on solutions.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
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 the computer you may delete unnecessary files and it causes discontinuous numbering of image files. Sometimes you many need to rename them with 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 the filename (for example, 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 file names 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 of renaming...