tony@oha.UUCP (Tony Olekshy) (05/14/88)
A discussion of how to rename a set of files from the csh user prompt has
recently been carried out in this newsgroup. This is really a specific case
of operating over each item in a group with a command. Unfortunately, the csh
looping construct is messy and does not admit to the operation of the history
mechanism. I use the csh as an interactive shell but use sh for scripts.
Since I am therefore familiar with the sh syntax, I use the following looping
mechanism from the csh prompt:
%sh -cx 'for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do cp /dev/null $i.a; done'
%sh -cx 'for file in ?.a; do mv $file `basename $file .a`.b; done'
If you know or can learn a little sh syntax, this works like a charm. The -x
option gives you a running log of what is going on. History-based editing
works unexpectedly well, because the whole looping command is a single
string, ie, !!:2 is
'for file in ?.a; do mv $file `basename $file .a`.b; done'