Morning all

I've got loads of scripts but the names are too long! I've stuck the list in a flat file (names) and I'm trying to read that in line by line and create the new names (in to directory new) from the list. It looks like this:

 xargs -n1 -I{} <names cat {} | sed 's/scr99000001/scr991/g' >new

You can just read the filenames from your file using a while-read loop. Within that loop, use cp. To generate the destination filename, you can use sed or the shell's parameter expansion operators to strip leading directories, modify the filename (e.g. ${var//pattern/replacement}), and prepend the new directory.

Alternatively, you can use pax in copy mode, -rw, with the -s option to modify the filenames as they're copied to the destination.

Regards,
Alister