Comments on: Bash Script To Change File Extensions

By: Jonathan Franzone

Jonathan Franzone — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 02:47:16 +0000

lol – Well, certainly I’m not saying that there is a “need” for Cygwin in Windows, per se. However, I personally am more comfortable in *nix land as far as the command prompt goes. Does Windows have a built regular expression parser (ie Sed)? Nope.

So basically it comes down to preference. If you like doing things the Windows way then that’s great. If you like Linux/Unix then you can have that too! Thanks for taking the time to comment.

By: Brian D

Brian D — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 23:55:39 +0000

In windows there’s no need for Cygwin, this is one of the extremely rare occasions that cmd.exe can actually do something well:

move *.old *.new

Works with copy as well.

By: Claudio Procida

Claudio Procida — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:06:14 +0000

Thanks Jonathan, you’ve saved my day.
I’ve adapted your script to ’svn mv’ files by changing extension.
Honestly, I didn’t know the /# /% syntax inside brackets!

By: Jonathan Franzone

Jonathan Franzone — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 15:52:27 +0000

Bash is very powerful and you can basically tell it to do whatever you want... so sure! You could try playing with the find syntax. I was able to get find to get a listing of files with it's -iregex option, which uses regular expressions to find the files. find "${1}" -regextype "posix-extended" -iregex ".*.(psd|tif|jpg)" You could hard code the extensions in your find statement or you could pass them in on the command line if you liked.

By: Ben R

Ben R — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 15:30:22 +0000

Thanks for that, Jonathan

Is there a simple way to adapt the script to accept multiple incoming extensions all at once (say, psd, tif, jpg)

I’m tying it in with some “sips” usgae on OS X to batch convert entire directory trees to small jpegs.

Thanks, Ben