UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I was wondering if there was a way to append something to filenames based on a wildcard. For example, if I have the following files in a directory:

blah1
blah2
blah3
blah4
blah5

I want to rename these all to:

blah1.txt
blah2.txt
blah3.txt
blah4.txt
blah5.txt

Is there a way to select all the blah files (using say, 'blah*'?) and then appending the same text to the end of them? I was looking at the mv command, but I was unsure of how to take all the filenames after saying 'mv blah*' and append text to them.

Thanks,
Dan

Code:

for file in blah* ; do
    mv $file ${file}.txt
done

Wow, I never even thought of using a loop. That works perfectly!

Just one more quick question:

Is there a similar method that will allow me to remove certain text from a number of files? For example, let's say I want to remove the .txt from all the files.

I apologize if this should easily follow from the above example, but I'm pretty new to this type of manipulation.

Thanks a lot,
Dan

You could use this in combination with the previous technique.

Code:

# file=abcdef.txt
# echo ${file%%.txt}
abcdef

or use the basename command

Code:

# basename $file .txt
abcdef

Awesome! Thanks so much for the help.