Bash – How to copy multiple files by wildcard

bashfile-copywildcards

I have a folder with a number of files in it ABC.* (there are roughly 100 such files). I want to duplicate them all to new files with names starting with DEF.*

So, I want

ABC.Page1
ABC.Page2
ABC.Topic12
...etc

copied to

DEF.Page1
DEF.Page2
DEF.Topic12
...etc

What is the simplest way to do this with a batch command (in BASH or similar)? I am thinking something involving sed or awk or xargs, but I'm having difficulty figuring out the syntax. I could write a Python script, but I'm thinking there is probably a command line solution that is not too complicated.

Best Answer

How about something like this in bash:

for file in ABC.*; do cp "$file" "${file/ABC/DEF}";done

you can test it by putting echo in front of the cp command:

for file in ABC.*; do echo cp "$file" "${file/ABC/DEF}";done

Related Solutions

Shell Scripting – How to Copy Multiple Files and Keep Their Extensions

You can use bash's string substitution features for that:

for file in /tmp/p/DSC*.JPG; do
  cp "$file" "${file%.JPG}"_orig.JPG
done

The general format is ${string%substring} which will remove substring from the end of string. For example:

$ f=foobar.JPG; echo "${f%.JPG}"
foobar

Linux – Make disk/disk copy slower

You can throttle a pipe with pv -qL (or cstream -t provides similar functionality)

tar -cf - . | pv -q -L 8192 | tar -C /your/usb -xvf -

-q removes stderr progress reporting.

The -L limit is in bytes.

More about the --rate-limit/-L flag from the man pv:

-L RATE, --rate-limit RATE

    Limit the transfer to a maximum of RATE bytes per second.
    A suffix of "k", "m", "g", or "t" can be added to denote
    kilobytes (*1024), megabytes, and so on.

This answer originally pointed to throttle but that project is no longer available so has slipped out of some package systems.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Shell Scripting – How to Copy Multiple Files and Keep Their Extensions

Linux – Make disk/disk copy slower

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