Re: [TUHS] Origins of globbing

On 7 Oct 2020 03:22 -0600, from arnold(a)skeeve.com: I like rename from https://metacpan.org/release/File-Rename for that purpose. It takes a regular expressions (actually, Perl expression, so could in principle be any valid Perl code) plus a set of file names, and renames each file according to the regexp. Plus you don't need to worry about things like quoting within the command as with the above, and it even has -0 for when reading those extra-exotic file names from stdin. (For one thing, I hope none of your files has a space or a semicolon in its name with your style of rename as-is. :)) In Debian, that's https://packages.debian.org/stable/rename; I suspect other systems with reasonably large package repositories also offer it prepackaged. About the only downside is its dependence on Perl (after all, that's rather heavyweight), but then again a lot of other things also depend on Perl so it's kind of hard to have even a minimal modern system that doesn't have Perl installed... Having to escape every '.' would probably be even more annoying than modern GNU ls's default non-"-N" behavior; and worse in the sense that _most_ of the time, it would probably work without escaping it, but when it doesn't work, it would break in various spectacular fashions. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”