Rename - what does s// vs y// mean?

Question

The man page (http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/dapper/man1/prename.1.html) gives two examples:

rename ’s/\.bak$//’ *.bak
rename ’y/A-Z/a-z/’ *

So it's either s or y and then /replaceThis/withThis

What does the leading s and y mean? Are there other options?

Answer 1

In the first case:

rename ’s/\.bak$//’ *.bak

you are running a regular expression again filenames and replacing matching part of expressions (.bak at the end of a file name) with the second expression (which is empty).

In the second case:

rename ’y/A-Z/a-z/’ *

you are matching against the regular expression pattern space and transliterating to the target. In other words, 'A-Z' is changed to' a-z', making the filenames lower case.

I suggest you look at the man page for sed for more commands and more details. I'll add that I believe the 's' command is used most often. regex (section 7) and perl documentation may also be of help. In particular, here's a tutorial on perl and regular expressions.

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s/regexp/replacement/
Attempt to match regexp against the pattern space. If success‐ ful, replace that portion matched with replacement. The replacement may contain the special character & to refer to that portion of the pattern space which matched, and the special escapes \1 through \9 to refer to the corresponding matching sub-expressions in the regexp.

y/source/dest/
Transliterate the characters in the pattern space which appear in source to the corresponding character in dest.