Can't rename each 'file' to 'file.text' (using xargs)

Question

I have received a task to do these commands on a text file:

1. Choose each second field from the file
2. Sort and choose first 3 unique values
3. Print the contents of each value.text while redirecting stderr

The thing I've come with is

cut cities.txt -f1 | sort| uniq | head -3 | xargs rename "s/*/*.text/" * | xargs cat 2>error.txt

but this gives an error:

Quantifier follows nothing in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/* <-- HERE / at (user-supplied code).  

I also tried to do it with mv * *.text, but it doesn't work, saying mv: target 'Germany' is not a directory, with "Germany" being the last value in the list of values.

Either of these commands is fine with me, but explaining why both of them do not work (and how to make them work) would be more appreciated.

Answer 1

In case anyone ever stumbles upon this question: John1024's comment to the question is the correct solution, though there's one thing to notice - the error messages generated by the attempt to print out the contents of non-existing files are generated by xargs rename "s/.*/$&.text/", therefore if you need to redirect your error messages to a different file, you have to append 2>error.text to the rename command, and not write another one | xargs cat 2>error.txt