On Mar 23, 2005, at 8:33 PM, David Haines wrote: > I'm faced with a large number of files named: > filename.w01.tif > > and need to be able to strip all of them of : .tif > > This is certainly beyond my limited-but-slowly-growing shell-scripting > abilities. > > If you suggest something perl-based, the machine in question is running > 10.3.8, for what that will be worth. Some flavor of Perl v5.8.x Since you mentioned Perl, I cooked up a quick-and-dirty Perl script to accomplish your task. I'm sure it could be improved in a number of ways, mainly because it's been about 6 years since I've used Perl daily, but here it is. At any rate, Larry Wall probably isn't monitoring this group. ;) Basically, put this into a file, set permissions so it's executable, then call it, passing in the extension you want to strip off. So if I called it strip_extension, I might do strip_extension tif and it would remove the trailing ".tif" from each file matching that criteria. It works out of the current directory (wherever you are when you execute it), so I'd suggest putting it in your path someplace or putting the script in the same location as your files to be renamed. I have ~/bin in my path, so that's where I put mine. ----- #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; my $ext; my $file; my $oldfile; my @files; if(@ARGV) { $ext = $ARGV[0]; @files = <*.$ext>; foreach $file (@files) { $oldfile = $file; $file =~ s/(.*)\.$ext/\1/; rename $oldfile, $file; } } else { die "ERROR: No extension provided\n"; } ----- Good luck! -- Jeff Winchester jeffw at tampabay.rr.com