What I love about Unix? Well, that you learn something new every day ;-) (just to name one thing I love about it …). So I’m currently in the process of learning some new frameworks and also getting more familiar with Perl (for … I think it’s now the 4th time). Today I started messing a little bit around with Django and also more or less by accident started watching some of the webcasts posted on the Plone website. Very informative and entertaining stuff esp. if you’ve already at least seen some source code produced for the mentioned technologies there (and I don’t mean Zope/Plone) ;-)
Anyway, Sean Kelly was doing some commandline magic in his webcast comparing J2EE with things like Zope and RoR and used something I had never seen before:
You want to rename a folder for example correcting a plural form or something similiar:
mv picture{,s}
This will rename the folder/file “picture” into “pictures”. Very handy :D Actually it will simply take the word “picture” and split it up into 2 strings: One without and one with “s” appended. Just try it with something like this:
echo {hello,world}
Absolutely cool, also for creating multiple folders within a shared parent directory ;-)
mkdir /Users/zerok/{hello,world}
After some short checking the Bash reference manual I now know, that this feature is called “brace expansion”.
Do you want to give me feedback about this article in private? Please send it to comments@zerokspot.com.
Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂