curly braces on the shell

[jadelennox]

So a fun shell trick (works in bash, tcsh, zsh) involves curly brace expansion. Different shells have different complexities, but the simplest case that works in all shells is

mv movies-19{92,93}.txt

which expands

mv movies-1992.txt movies-1993.txt

I use this daily. Usually to say mv foo.sh{,.bak} which translates to mv foo.sh foo.sh.bak

Comments

[troisroyaumes]

Wow, why didn't I know this before? Thank you, that is such a timesaver.

[cxcvi]

I know I've used that syntax before, but the usage in the last line is new to me. That's actually really clever.

[afuna]

I love this and ilu.

[pauamma]

ISTR first finding out about this on whatever *csh ran on SunOS 3 and SunOS 4. (IIRC, straight 4.xBSD csh)

[brownbetty]

I used this on a rather complicated rsync recipe the other day and felt very clever.

[schilling_klaus]

You can even use serveral curly-brace-expressions, and they will be expanded like multiplying sums in arithmetics.

{foo,bar}{.tex,.pdf}
becomes
foo.tex foo.pdf bar.tex bar.pfd