ren
In DOS, you can do 'ren *.txt *.bak'. Ren does the same sort of thing, but better. Each filename matching the source pattern is renamed using the destination pattern. There are checks to make sure files are not lost or overwritten.
| Operating Systems | POSIX |
|---|---|
| Implementation | C |
Recent releases
- 17 Sep 2001 16:16
No changes have been submitted for this release.
- All comments
Recent commentsDirectories
ren renames normal files AND directories.
mmv renames only normal files.
Re: What about good ol' mmv?
Of course I agree that in general it is better to improve existing programs rather than start new ones. If you want to time-travel back to the 1980s and explain this to the author, go right ahead...
Given that multiple programs do exist (for this task or for any other), it is best to have them all listed on Freshmeat. The alternative is to still have several half-finished projects, but without them being able to discover each other :-(.
(Actually in this case ren and mmv seem to be different versions of the same tool. If someone adds mmv to Freshmeat then the entry for ren can be replaced with a redirect to that project.)
ren
Interesting comments by another. I'm not enough into Unix to comment on the larger utilities issues. I had wanted to pass along Thanks for ren (or anything else like it). Also report that it seems to work fine under Cygwin. I'll ad it to my Mandrake set-up as well.
Re: What about good ol' mmv?
> I think that mmv is an
> enhanced version of ren... or the other
> way round... anyway, at least one of
> them is now listed on Freshmeat. If you
> want to add a project entry for mmv,
> that would be useful.
I didn't want to say something against "ren" - I only wanted to show the problem of dozens of similar programs.
Our community of programmers (and of course users) of free software should IMHO concentrate on improving existing software instead of writing new ones.
Freshmeat daily shows new examples for this - I wonder if the existing software isn't worth beeing really worked on to produce something that is 100%.
Are dozens of beta-quality programs better than one mature one?
Re: What about good ol' mmv?
There is a FAQ somewhere that explains the difference between ren and mmv. That's how I originally found out about this program. I think that mmv is an enhanced version of ren... or the other way round... anyway, at least one of them is now listed on Freshmeat. If you want to add a project entry for mmv, that would be useful.