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?