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Does anyone remember Primos? It had a shell-level thing called name generation which was very useful. For example, to rename a bunch of files from part1.suffix to part1.new.suffix2 you could say:

rename *.suffix =.+new.suffix2

That's a very simple example, it was quite powerful. The control characters were:

=,==,^=,^==,+

Which meant approximately: match 1 filename component, match all remaining components, delete one component, delete all remaining, add a component.

In conjunction with Primos wildcards you could do pretty much any useful file renaming/copying operation very conveniently.

It was much better than Unix wildcards and name generation/iteration and I'd like to find it again and use it. Has anyone seen it around?

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    Might be better on superuser...
    – pst
    Jun 2, 2012 at 7:35
  • also look into zsh, it has some pretty powerful globbing and renaming capabilities. rayninfo.co.uk/tips/zshtips.html Jun 2, 2012 at 7:56
  • Thanks for zsh tips. Will check those. Looks like Primos has pretty much vanished. Cripes, I spent all the 80's on Primos. Greg E
    – Greg E
    Jun 14, 2012 at 21:24

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