Need a file renaming facility

[Gary Benson]

Hello,

I recently subscribed to this group to see if it's an appropriate place to
ask a question I've had for some time now. It seems to be, so here goes:

I work in a publications department, and in the nature of our business, we
create, rename, and destroy a LOT of files. A typical directory may have
many similar file names. Wildcards help in deleting unneeded files, but not
in copying or moving them. For example, consider the following files in a
directory associated with a technical manual:

    QT.1.r	   QT.4.r	  QT.A.r
    QT.2.r	   QT.5.r	  QT.annotations.r
    QT.3.r	   QT.6.r	  QT.toc.r

For information only, the product is called QuickTools, there is one file
per section of the manual (1 through 6), one for Appendix A, one for
illustration annotations, and the table of contents. In preparing this
manual for production, I run a shell script called "prep" that gets rid of
extra spacing, intermediate formatting commands, comments and so on, and
creates an output file for each input file. Now my directory now looks like
this:

    QT.1.r	   QT.4.r	       QT.A.r
    Qt.1.r.pre	   QT.4.r.pre	       QT.A.r.pre
    QT.2.r	   QT.5.r	       QT.annotations.r
    QT.2.r.pre	   QT.5.r.pre	       QT.annotations.r.pre
    QT.3.r	   QT.6.r	       QT.toc.r
    QT.3.r.pre	   QT.6.r.pre	       QT.toc.r.pre

Now I want to rename all those ".pre" files to the same name without ".pre".
In other words, I want the directory to look like it did when I began, (like
separate mv commands, or cp followed by rm *.pre) separate mv and I realize
that a smarter shell script could have taken care of this as part of the
prepping process, but there are many ways that people in our group wind up
with associated files with similar filenames they want to rename all at
once. The alternative (separate 'mv' commands for each section) is
time-consuming and error prone. What I'm looking for is a general-purpose
renaming facility that (I hope) takes wild cards, with this kind of synatax:


    rename -f QT.?.r.pre QT.?.r

	      -or-

    rename QT.*.r.pre QT.*.r

	   -or even-

    rename QT.?.r.pre \#.r (to change QT.1.r.pre to 1.r, etc)

Hopefully a -f option would do it without question, -i would ask before
blowing away the file of the same name and -i being the default. No -r
option!

Has anyone invented such a thing? If so, could you send me a copy? If not,
can anyone explain a workable approach to doing this?

I'd appreciate any help you can give me.

___
Gary Benson		   -_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-inc at tc.fluke.com_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
Publication Services	   Ensign Benson, Space Cadet, Digital Circus, Sector R
John Fluke Mfg. Co. Inc.   _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-




-- 
Gary Benson   
Publication Services	-=[ inc : 5367 : 232E ]=-