“Have you ever wanted to change the names of many files at
once? How about using a default value for a variable if it has no
value? These and many other options are available to you through
string operators in bash and other Bourne shell derived
shells.”
“There are three kinds of variable substitution:
- Pattern Matching,
- Substitution,
- Command Substitution.
I’ll talk about the first two and leave command substitution for
another article.”
“There are two kinds of pattern matching available, matching
from the left and matching from the right. The operators, with
their functions and an expample, are shown in the following
table… These operators can be used to do a variety of things. For
example, the following script will change the extension of all
‘.html’ files to ‘.htm’. ‘.html’ files to ‘.htm’.
#!/bin/bash
# quickly convert html filenames for use on a dossy system
# only handles file extensions, not file names
for i in *.html; do
if [ -f ${i%l} ]; then
echo ${i%l} already exists
else
mv $i ${i%l}
fi
done