Hi,

I want to remove a ".ff" from multiple filenames. Searching google and these forums brought me close, but no cigar. I know I can use sed to replace what I want, but I'm unsure how to input the filename (filename, not the stuff in the actual file) to the command.

For example, I know how to do something simple like:

echo filename.ff.txt | sed s/.ff//

which displays what i want.

How though would I actually do this?

Thank you very much,
Dan

I'm a beginner in UNIX. So I can do this in 6 steps.

1) ls -l | awk '{print $9}' > getfilenames1.txt
2) cp filenames1.txt filenames2.txt
3) vi filenames2.txt
i) :%s/ff.//g
4) vi filenames1.txt
i) :%s/^/mv /g # note blant after mv
5) paste -d" " filenames1.txt filenames2.txt > filename3
6) run filename3.

I know it can be done in one command at the prompt. But as a beginner, I have to try.

Not actually tested so maybe start by running this using 'echo' in place of 'mv'

Could be done using a 'for' loop too:
But that would throw a wobbly on filenames with spaces in them

Actually, it won't. That would work fine even for files with a space.

What would break is if the list of files was in a varible, and this also avouid the fork and exec needed for the other option, additionally you don't need -1 when piping the output of ls as it will output that way anyway when writing to a pipe.

If you are using bash or ksh93 you could do this:

Thank you very much for the informative replies guys. I used the last one to do the job, as it was quick. I will definitely study sed and awk more though; they seem incredibly useful.

@Smiling Dragon: I take great pains to make sure I never have any spaces in my filenames

Hope for the best and plan for the worst, it's always a sensible approach for things like filenames.

This looks like it would do the job after a few typos are fixed ), and it's safe in that you can look at the contents of filename3 to see if it's going to do what you would expect. Although if you use 'ls -1' instead of 'ls -l', then you don't need to use awk to filter out all the other junk but the filename (saves CPU).