UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

what you're asking for doesn't sound simple in any language, really. How's it supposed to tell the 'c' apart from the 'orders'? What if there's a file 'ordera.txt' as well, should it group them into order1/2/3/4 instead of order1, orders1/2/3? etc, etc. There's plenty of ambiguities.

But if just grouping on the last letter will do...

I have no idea if this will work in cygwin, you may need to install some more things.

Code:

cd /path/to/source
DATE=$(date +%m%d%Y)

echo *.txt | sed 's/.\.txt//' | sort -u |
while read PREFIX
do
    N=1
    for X in "${PREFIX}"*".txt"
    do
            VAL=$(printf "%02d" ${N})
            echo mv "${X}" /path/to/dest/"${PREFIX}_${DATE}_${VAL}.txt
            N=$((N+1))
    done
done

Remove the 'echo' once you're sure it does what you want.