hi, i am having set of files with the naming convention grap_Life_$cc$yy$mm$dd.txt. The above file was created by a script on this month.. i would like to get the above files to get renamed to today's date. i am encountering problem when there is two or more files with same format.. your help will be greatly appreciated. thanks for everyone gobi

what is $cc? and what do you mean by 2 or more files with same format? an example?

Hi ghostdog, I tend to think that $cc represents the "century" - and the format: well, I guess that gobi refers to files with identical filenames when talking about "format". Well, several files with identical filename in the same directory ? no chance . cheers

hi, i mean identical files in the same format but with different dates alone: eg: rush_Life_20070506.txt rush_Life_20070508.txt rush_Life_20070412.txt I need to take only files for current month and rename them one by one to current date. hope u got my view. thanks gobi

if you don't mind, you can try this [code] month=`date '+%m'` current=`date '+%Y%m%d'` awk -v mth=$month -v cur=$current ' BEGIN{ FS="[.]"} { n=split($1,arr,"_") if ( substr(arr[3],5,2) == mth ){ arr[3] = cur result = arr[1] for (i = 2; i <= n; i++) result = result "_" arr[i] result=result"."$NF cmd = "mv " "\047" $0 "\047" " " "\047" result "\047" print cmd ## system(cmd) ##uncomment to execute } }' "file" [/code]

hi, Thank u very much for ur help. it workssssss fineeeeee gobi