How to rename with prefix/suffix?

How do I do mv original.filename new.original.filename without retyping the original filename?

I would imagine being able to do something like mv -p=new. original.filename or perhaps mv original.filename new.~ or whatever - but I can't see anything like this after looking at man mv / info mv pages.

Of course, I could write a shell script to do this, but isn't there an existing command/flag for it?

Solution 1:

You could use the rename(1) command:

rename 's/(.*)$/new.$1/' original.filename

Edit: If rename isn't available and you have to rename more than one file, shell scripting can really be short and simple for this. For example, to rename all *.jpg to prefix_*.jpg in the current directory:

for filename in *.jpg; do mv "$filename" "prefix_${filename}"; done;

or also, leveraging from Dave Webb's answer and using brace expansion:

for filename in *.jpg; do mv {,prefix_}"$filename"; done;

Solution 2:

In Bash and zsh you can do this with Brace Expansion. This simply expands a list of items in braces. For example:

# echo {vanilla,chocolate,strawberry}-ice-cream
vanilla-ice-cream chocolate-ice-cream strawberry-ice-cream

So you can do your rename as follows:

mv {,new.}original.filename

as this expands to:

mv original.filename new.original.filename