Xargs -i problems.
 

Howdy!

I had a few files named nameNUMBER (like invoice0102 and so on) which I wanted to rename with a new name but keep the number. I first tried and xargs command that I didn't get to work so I fixed it "by hand" to solve my problem but then went back to the xargs idea to see if I could find out how it works. I fail to get it to work with xargs.

My try was:

find . -type f | xargs -iinvoice## mv invoice## paid##

The shell tries to do (verified with an echo infront of the mv):
mv invoice0102 paid##
mv invoice0103 paid##
... and so on.

So it works like intended apart from the fact that it does not replace the second ##. How can I get xargs to replace both ##?

Thanks a lot for any help!

Regards.

Anders, Gothenburg
Sweden.

I think I would do it this way:

for f in invoice*; do mv $f $(echo $f|sed s/invoice/paid/); done

better than calling sed for every line of input, which is very slow when there are a lot of files, you can use bash's internal string substitution. It is also good idea to quote the parameters to mv: