Create symbolic links to files using wildcards

Question

I want to create symlinks to multiple files:

ln -s dev-*.php 's/dev-(.*\.php)/$1/'

Results hoped for:  
    site.php links to dev-site.php  
    file.php links to dev-file.php

What's the most concise way to achieve this?

Answer 1

Well, if it's all in the same directory you could do something like this in bash or any other Bourne-style/POSIX shell:

for FILE in dev-*; do ln -s "$FILE" "${FILE#dev-}"; done

which would create symlinks without "dev-" to files beginning with "dev-".

Answer 2

I usually use a brief one-liner.

for file in dev-*.php; do ln -s $file $(echo "$file" | sed 's/^dev-//'); done

This cycles through the 'dev-*.php' files, getting the new name without 'dev-', then creating the symlink.

Answer 3

With zsh, you'd do:

autoload zmv # typically in ~/.zshrc
zmv -Lsv 'dev-(*.php)' '$1'

With bash or other POSIX shells (including zsh):

for f in dev-*.php; do
  ln -s "$f" "${f#dev-}"
done

Note that if site.php exists and is a directory (or a symlink to a directory), then you may end up with a dev-site.php symlink inside it. With GNU ln you could add the -T option to guard against that (with zmv use -o -T to pass the -T option down to ln).