Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1998 18:51:29 -0600 From: David Kelly <dkelly@HiWAAY.net> To: "James A. Taylor" <jataylor@lundahl.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Basic mv question? Message-ID: <199812120051.SAA49424@n4hhe.ampr.org> In-Reply-To: Message from "James A. Taylor" <jataylor@lundahl.com> of "Fri, 11 Dec 1998 09:29:42 MST." <36714876.A3B825A4@lundahl.com>
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"James A. Taylor" writes:
> I have a directory tree full of *.shtml files.
> I assumed that I could recursively rename all of
> the *.shtml files in that directory tree to *.html
> files. When I tried I got a usage message and
> from what I can tell the FreeBSD commands
> mv and cp do not take wild cards.
Very few Unix commands accept wildcards. The reason being is the
wildcards are expanded and command line parsed by the shell before the
command is loaded in memory. VMS and MS-DOS expected the command line
to be parsed and wildcards expanded in the application/command. The
following shell script might help demonstrate. The variable $* is the
invoking argument list:
#!/bin/sh
echo $*
I called it "args" and it looks like this when run:
% sh args this is a test /usr/ports/l* duh
this is a test /usr/ports/lang duh
So what I'm really trying to say is I'm concerned about the likelyhood
you have lost some of your files when you tried to mv them.
% mv -i *.shtml *.html
mv: No match.
% touch junk.shtml
% !mv
mv -i *.shtml *.html
usage: mv [-f | -i] source target
mv [-f | -i] source ... directory
% touch trash.html
% !mv
mv -i *.shtml *.html
overwrite trash.html? (y/n [n]) n
not overwritten
% ls -l *tml
-rw-r--r-- 1 dkelly dkelly 0 Dec 11 18:45 junk.shtml
-rw-r--r-- 1 dkelly dkelly 0 Dec 11 18:46 trash.html
% touch another.shtml
!mv
mv -i *.shtml *.html
usage: mv [-f | -i] source target
mv [-f | -i] source ... directory
% !ls
ls -l *tml
-rw-r--r-- 1 dkelly dkelly 0 Dec 11 18:48 another.shtml
-rw-r--r-- 1 dkelly dkelly 0 Dec 11 18:45 junk.shtml
-rw-r--r-- 1 dkelly dkelly 0 Dec 11 18:46 trash.html
%
Looks like you are safe after all.
--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@nospam.hiwaay.net
=====================================================================
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