Script bash

The tricky part in the middle is a Perl substitution with regular expressions, highlighted below:

rename -v ’s/\.htm$/\.html/’ *.htm

Tip: There is an intro to Perl regular expressions here.

Basically the "s" means substitute. The syntax is s/old/new/ — substitute the old with the new.

A . (period) has a special meaning in a regular expression — it means "match any character". We don't want to match any character in the example above. It should match only a period. The backslash is a way to "escape" the regular expression meaning of "any character" and just read it as a normal period.

The $ means the end of the string. \.htm$ means that it will match .htm but not .html.

It's fairly basic — substitute .htm with .html:

's/\.htm$/\.html/'

The last part of the command, highlighted below, means to apply the rename command to every file that ends with .htm (the * is a wildcard).

rename -v ’s/\.htm$/\.html/’ *.htm

ArcEye wrote:

On Debian at least, rename seems to have been updated.

It now takes perlexpr, which basically means regex

So you can do

rename 's/\.ngc/\.inv/' *.ngc

which explains why some of my scripts stopped working properly

regards