Well I have a love of files that I want then to have the .jpg ext in windows I would just


that would fix that. I thought I could use the mv command but that just put everything in a new folder called .jpg. I see that the mv command is just for renameing folders


2.6.21-1.3194.fc7

mv can be used for individual files OR directories. To contradict Mr Shakespeare the fault likes in your star(s).

If you mv file file.jpg it would work just fine.

However you told it to move * which means EVERYTHING to jpg so it assumed you meant you wanted to move all the files to a directory. If it HAD worked the way you told it then you'd end up with only a single file named jpg which would be the LAST file it found which would be even worse.

To rename all the files you could do:

for file in `ls [a-z]*`
do mv $file ${file}.jpg
done

The first line says to get a list of files that start with any character a-z (this helps to exclude files that start with . such as .bashrc that you do NOT want to rename as jpg files.). Note the characters here are backticks (same key as ~) rather than single quotes.

You put the braces around file in the do line so that it knows the variable is only $file and not $file.jpg which you haven't defined.

EDIT: Never mind - the equivalent example was already posted by jlightner...

it did reame 90 files. now what do I do and I move them to a new folder.
but 600 files is a lot of files to name.

I see that there are no files with that start with files. thank you for helping me I just change the [a-z] to [0-9]

Right - you could also just use the pattern [a-zA-Z0-9]* - that would find all files that started with a standard alphanumeric character.

If you're lazy, you could just use Krename - it does all of that and more. If someone spent their time writing this sort of app, why not use it?

One could also use something like:

(I'm assuming, of course, that there are no non-jpg files in ./. If there are, then just specify the relevant prefixes, foo* 123*, etc.)

For a large number of files, this will be much faster than spawning an instance of mv for each file.

Hmm, let me see, can you say "bloatware"?

Besides, with that logic, you could say the same thing about Windows!

I thought perl was hard. my be I should get a book on it. thank you for showing me someing new and simple. that is cool.

You don't need the `ls ...` in the for loop. You can use filename globbing to supply the names:

for file in [0-9A-F]*; do
rm "$file" "${file}.jpg"
done