Question

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?

Answer 1

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