Re: Has rename syntax changed?

[L A Walsh <cygwin@tlinx.org>]

On 2020/02/28 04:38, Fergus Daly wrote:
> I am almost certain that the command
> $ rename "anything" "AnyThing" *.ext
> would alter the string from lc to uc as shown, anywhere it occurred in any filename in *.ext in the current directory.
>   
isn't that they same as "mv anything.xxx Anything.xxx" ?


> What I remember as past behaviour now fails, leaving he filename unaltered.
>   

/tmp> ll *.xxx
-rw-rw-rw-+ 1 0 Mar  3 14:30 anything.xxx
/tmp> rename any Any *.xxx
/tmp> ll *.xxx
-rw-rw-rw-+ 1 0 Mar  3 14:30 Anything.xxx
---
    Works here on a local NTFS file system.
> (Failure in much the same way as mv would fail if the similar attempt was made.)
>   
----
???
Like this?:

/tmp> touch anything.xxx
/tmp> mv anything.xxx Anything.xxx
/tmp> ll *.xxx
-rw-rw-rw-+ 1 0 Mar  3 14:30 Anything.xxx
/tmp> rename Any any *.xxx
> (Good old DOS command rename (or the abbreviation ren) used to achieve multiple-rename in an easy manner that just eludes bash.)
>   
---
    'rename' is not a bash builtin or feature, neither is 'mv' nor
my preference: 'mmv':

/tmp> ll *.xxx
-rw-rw-rw-+ 1 0 Mar  3 14:30 anything.xxx
/tmp> mmv 'a*.xxx' 'A#1.xxx'      #(same as "mmv a\*.xxx A\#1.xxx' )
/tmp> ll *.xxx
-rw-rw-rw-+ 1 0 Mar  3 14:30 Anything.xxx

FWIW: w/mmv, meta chars like '*' in source and '#' in target need to be
quoted to protect from shell expansion.

> Anyway: has something altered (and quite recently, i think), or am I just mis-remembering the versatility of the command rename?
>   
----
    I think that the 'whatever' that has changed is likely a different
file system.

    Besides the above tests/examples on Win7/NTFS, I got similar results
on a network share from a Linux-Samba server.

Oh -- one more potential gotcha:

the '*.xxx' pattern you are giving to rename is subject to shell
expansion (shell being bash in this case).  If the *.xxx doesn't
match all your targets and bash doesn't have 'nocaseglob' set, you
can get:

/tmp> shopt -u nocaseglob nocasematch
/tmp> rename Anything anything *.xxx
rename: *.xxx: not accessible: No such file or directory
/tmp> shopt -s nocaseglob nocasematch
/tmp> rename Anything anything *.xxx

Why?: because my filename was 'Anything.Xxx' (Anything.XXX would do the 
same).

Even though the file system ignores case, if bash is told
not to ignore case, the '*.xxx' won't match anything but all lower
case extensions.

It's a contrived case, but illustrates that the pattern at
the end isn't seen by 'rename' because it is 1st expanded by bash.

Hope this helps, and isn't overkill! ;-)





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