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

[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