Downlloaded some pdf files, but wanted to access them from the local server. Did not want to edit several hundred lines into an html file so I create a batch file. Then the job was done in seconds rather than hours. Learned a bit more about sed in the process.
# turn a pdf list into a usable http file for a web server.
ls *.pdf > pdflist
cut -d "." -f1 pdflist > descripts
sed -i -e 's/^/<a href=\"/' pdflist
sed -i 's/$/\"\>/'...
