Redbeard's Thoughts

The other day I needed to rename a set of files to a set of names that didn't necessarily work well programatically. While there are tools to do this (vidir comes to mind) I didn't have any available.

So I created a simple file to math things up:

sourcefile1 destfile-a
sourcefile3 destfile-b
sourcefile2 destfile-c

Then I ran this command:

cat movelist | xargs -n 2 mv

and all the files were renamed.

The trick is the -n 2 parameter to xargs. It passes words to mv two whitespace-delimited words at a time. You can do more complicated things like while loops with the read command, but that would have been overkill for this one-off solution.

To see another use of this, see my other blog.