Quickest way to rename files, without retyping directory path

Question

I know how to rename files in Unix:

$ mv ~/folder/subfolder/file.txt ~/folder/subfolder/file.sh

     ^-------this part------^    ^------this part-------^

It takes too long time to repeat ~/folder/subfolder/file twice.

Is there a quicker way?

Answer 1

If your shell supported Brace Expansion (works with csh, tcsh, ksh, zsh, bash, mksh, lksh, pdksh, yash with brace-expand enabled by calling yash --brace-expand or set in interative shell with set -o brace-expand, or fish):

mv ~/folder/subfolder/file.{txt,sh}

Answer 2

You can also use rename (part of the util-linux package).

rename .txt .sh ~/folder/subfolder/file.txt

See the rename man page for more details.

Answer 3

All the above are good. This would also work :

( cd ~/folder/subfolder && mv file.txt file.sh )

Answer 4

No. You need to give the full path to the file in order to rename it. The only alternative is to move into the target folder before running the mv:

cd ~/folder/subfolder/
mv file.txt file.sh

Alternatively, you could write a little function that renames the file in the target directory. For example, add these lines to your shell initialization file (~/.bashrc if you are using bash):

lmv(){
    _path=$(dirname -- "$1")
    _target="${_path%/}/$2"
    mv -- "$1" "$_target"
}

Then, open a new terminal or just run source ~/.bashrc to re-read the init file and you can do:

lmv ~/folder/subfolder/file.txt file.sh

Answer 5

Just to expand the usefulness of cuonglm's answer (NOT to take any credit as I love his solution) and his answer is a correct one.

The use case is that we often want to mv a file in a remote location (the real issue), e.g. /folder/subfolder/configFile.dat TO configFile.dat.orig

This form of the command adds a file extension (not replacing the original extension)

mv ~/folder/subfolder/file.txt{,.orig}

Explained: "{,.orig}" means replace (nothing) on the end of the file name with (something) ".orig"

OR to remove a file extension (reverse the rename)

mv ~/folder/subfolder/file.txt{.orig,}

Note: Still on topic for "Quickest way to rename files without retyping the dir path"

Answer 6

Yes. If you use bash, you do sudo pushd ~/folder/subfolder/ && sudo mv ./file.txt ./file.sh && popd.

Which is actually bigger and may fail if you lost access permissions to the original directory when you did the popd.