small programming question

[John Summerfied]

Bob Chiodini wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-05-23 at 03:43 -0400, Claude Jones wrote:
> 
>>Could someone help. I have chosen a bad naming convention for a long list, and 
>>I need to make a small alteration. The list looks like the following
>>001-Fig 1-1.jpg   
>>013-Fig 4-4a.jpg  
>>024-Fig 5-6.jpg   
>>035-Fig 5-17.jpg
>>etc...
>>I would like to add a 0 to each group of three numbers at the beginning of 
>>each name so that 001-Fig 1-1.jpg becomes 0010-Fig 1--1.jpg for example.
>>Could someone help me with the quick way to do this? 
>>-- 
>>Claude Jones
>>Bluemont, VA, USA
>>
> 
> Claude,
> 
> Are you attempting to rename files or edit a list of file names?
> 
> For the latter, you could use gedit and replace all occurrences "-F"
> with "0-F".
> 
> For the former you would need to script it.  Something like:
> 
> for i in *.jpg; do newname=`echo $i | sed s/-/0-/`; mv "$i" "$newname"; done
> 

I'd move them to a work directory, Just In Case:
mkdir work
for f in *jpg
   do mv $f work/0$f
done
# If okay:
mv work/* .
rmdir work


-- 

Cheers
John

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