Eventually I will put more Perl related information here.

For the time being, I made a number of howto documents.

Rename files.

Here is a brilliant program for renaming one or more files according to a specified Perl expression. I found it on page 706 of Programming Perl (3rd edition).

#!/usr/bin/perl
$op = shift;
for( @ARGV ) {
    $was = $_;
    eval $op;
    die if $@;
    rename( $was, $_ ) unless $was eq $_;
}

In the code above, the second last line calls the built-in function "rename", not the program itself (which is named "rename.pl"). Below are a few examples of use.

% rename.pl 's/\.htm/\.html/' *.htm         # append an 'l'
% rename.pl '$_ .= ".old"' *.html           # append '.old'
% rename.pl 'tr/A-Z/a-z/' *.HTML            # lowercase
% rename.pl 'y/A-Z/a-z/ unless /^Make/' *   # lowercase