[nflug] file name extensions

[Mark T. Valites]

On Thu, 16 Nov 2006, Robert Meyer wrote:

> Not necessarily so.  I made that as a general case.  There are a zillion 
> ways to get a list of files into that command.  The implementation was 
> left as an exercise for the reader :-)
>
> Hmmm.. OK, guys.  How many ways are there to do this in Unix?  I'll bet 
> we can come up with at least five or six.  Take into account the fact 
> that there could be spaces in the files and we want to traverse a 
> directory, recurively.  You're allowed to use any shell you want, 
> including perl.  Points awarded for snarky, weird or just plain bizarre 
> methods.  It has to work properly.
>
> Here is my contribution:
> #!/bin/bash
> for name in `find $1 -type f`; do
>   mv "$name" "${name}.sxw"
> done

No, the example above would be the perfect example for useless use of a 
for loop, regardless of how "generic" it was designed or how well it 
"recurively" traversed a directory. The for loop needlessly iterates over 
a list generated by find when find could do everything needed in one shot.

It also could potentially suffer from a limit of the length of command the 
shell can handle.

A simpler solution that explicitly lists the source and destination files 
names would be:

$ find /path -type f -exec  mv {} {}.sxw \;

Better yet:

$ find /path -type f -exec mv {}{,.sxw} \;

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