Backup a programming directory

Question

I have a directory with many compiled C programs that I would like to back up. Right now they are named program.out but I would like to change this to just program.

Would it still be possible to exclude these? Also, what sort of regex would I use to quickly rename them all?

Answer 1

For backing up your code use git or other version control software. On the internet you got lot of choices to name some: github, bitbucket.

In git you got file .gitignore if you add there *.out then it wont be transfered to the repository

Answer 2

I'm not too clear on your first question. If you want to rename program.out to program then just run:

mv program{.out,}

---

For the second question, assuming I wanted to obtain a list of files in /etc with a suffix:

#!/bin/bash
ls /etc > /tmp/etcfiles
while read line
do
   if [[ $line =~ \..+ ]]; then
      echo $line
   fi
done < /tmp/etcfiles

You can adjust the above as required.

• \. matches a literal period.
• . matches any character following the period.
• + says that at least one character must follow the initial period. So this will match test.c, but not test. If you want to match test. as well, then change the + to a *.

Answer 3

If you're using bash as a shell, this is a simple task for a shell pipeline.

ls | grep '\.out$' | while read file; do echo mv "$file" "${file%.*}"; done

ls produces a list of files in the directory.

grep '\.out$' extracts the filenames that end in .out and discards the rest.

while read file reads the filenames one at a time.

echo mv "$file" "${file%.*}" displays but does not run a mv command that would rename each file to a version without its extension. The ${file%.*} business is bash syntax for stripping off a file extension. When you're satisfied that the pipeline would do what you wanted if it were run for real, remove the echo part and let it run for real.

ls | grep '\.out$' | while read file; do mv "$file" "${file%.*}"; done