UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am trying to add an temporary extension to the end of all files under a certain directory that contain a certain substring within their name. I've tried using a pipe by doing "ls -R -1|grep "*substring*"|mv -S a=.tmp . ." but realized that won't work because mv doesn't accept input from stdin and ls doesn't return the full path name of files. I then tried using find by doing "find . -name "*substring*" -exec mv -S a=.tmp {} . ';'" but using the period puts all the files the calling directory. I am running out of ideas on how to do this. Does anyone know a command to do this? Thanks

Start testing with something like this:

Code:

for file in `ls -R -1 *somestring*`
do
    mv "$file" "$file".tmp
done

find . -name "*somestring*" | xargs -I {} mv {} {}.tmp

Thanks, that seems to work but not quite the way I was hoping. The reason I was trying to use the -S option on the mv was because I have remove the .tmp extension immediately after running something else. This doesn't seem easily feasible though with your method. Is there a similar way to remove the .tmp?

try this, if this is not what you wanted... can you post an example

find . -name "*somestring*" |sed 's/.tmp$//g' | xargs -I {} mv {}.tmp {}

Ah, genius! That is exactly what I was looking for. I have a lot to learn. Thanks for the help