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
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

  • By
    5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About

    CSS and JavaScript:  the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release.  They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely.  We have our .js files and our .css, but...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    dwProgressBar v2:  Stepping and Events

    dwProgressBar was a huge hit when it debuted. For those of you who didn't catch my first post, dwProgressBar is a MooTools 1.2-based progress bar which allows for as much flexibility as possible. Every piece of dwProgressBar can be controlled by CSS...

  • By
    Hot Effect: MooTools Drag Opacity

    As you should already know, the best visual features of a website are usually held within the most subtle of details. One simple trick that usually makes a big different is the use of opacity and fading. Another awesome MooTools functionality is...

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!