Looking for some help in renaming files using a shell script. Suppose I have a directory which contains several files, some of which are *.dat files. If there are 7 *.dat files, I would like to rename all 7 *.dat files to *.01, *.02, ... *.07 Here is what I have thus far: ls -l *.dat $*| awk ` NF == 9 && /^-/{ #can someone explain this? this seems to loop through $ ++filenum #increments to count number of *.dat files print filenum, "\t", $9 #prints filenumber and current *.dat filename newfile= $9 ".0" filenum #produces *.dat.01, but want *.01, *.02, etc mv $9 $newfile # seems to do nothing, why? }` Any help is greatly appreciated!

I'm having a problem following your awk code. One thing is sure: you can NOT embed other shell commands like mv inside an awk script - not without using the awk system command. How about this script: #!/bin/ksh typeset -2Z i i=0 ch /path/to/mydir find . -type f -name "*.dat" -print|while read fname do ((i=i+1)) echo "$i" echo "$fname" mv "$fname" "$fname.$i" done The above scrpt might have problems if your directory has subdirectories with files named *.dat or if any of your file names contain a space.

Thank you - With a little tweaking, I think what you provided will work. I added some code to replace the .dat with .01, etc. rather than append. My only issue now is that I can't figure out what order it is applying these numbers in. When I sort by filename, the numbers are coming out *.04, *.01, *.03, *.01 - I would have thought it would take my input files in order of filename. Also what is "ch" - this is not found by my system, and might have something to do with the ordering? Thanks nails.

First, I'm a bozo. That "ch" is suppose to be a "cd" for change directory. I apologize. Second, I don't know what to tell you about the sort issue without seeing the data and how you are using the sort command. Oh, and you're welcome.

Well, I am not really using a "sort" command. It is picking the order in which to rename the files - and it doesn't appear to be based on filename, or file size. Ideally, I'd like it to sort by filename prior to renaming. Other than that, everything is working great.