File Extension Change Shortcut

By  on  

Changing the extension of a file seems like something you would do often enough to know how to do it from command line.  One annoying part of moving a file is repeating the file name a second time when all I want to do is change the extension.  A minor annoyance but an annoyance nonetheless.

I recently found that you can quickly change a file's extension with this handy shortcut:

# mv filename.{old,new}
mv code.{txt,js}

The braced syntax provides a way to quickly swap out the file extension without needing to repeat the file name.  Sweet!

Recent Features

  • By
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

  • By
    Responsive and Infinitely Scalable JS Animations

    Back in late 2012 it was not easy to find open source projects using requestAnimationFrame() - this is the hook that allows Javascript code to synchronize with a web browser's native paint loop. Animations using this method can run at 60 fps and deliver fantastic...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Geolocation API

    One interesting aspect of web development is geolocation; where is your user viewing your website from? You can base your language locale on that data or show certain products in your store based on the user's location. Let's examine how you can...

  • By
    Elegant Overflow with CSS Ellipsis

    Overflow with text is always a big issue, especially in a programmatic environment. There's always only so much space but variable content to add into that space. I was recently working on a table for displaying user information and noticed that longer strings were...

Discussion

  1. This does not only work for file extensions. You can generally use the curly braces syntax to “generate” multiple words/arguments for a bash command: http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Brace-Expansion

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!