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
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

  • By
    5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of

    My trip to Mozilla Summit 2013 was incredible.  I've spent so much time focusing on my project that I had lost sight of all of the great work Mozillians were putting out.  MozSummit provided the perfect reminder of how brilliant my colleagues are and how much...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Dynamic Waveform Visualizations with wavesurfer.js

    Waveform images are an awesome addition to boring audio widgets.  They can be functional as well as aesthetically pleasing, allowing users to navigate audio visually.  I recently found wavesurfer.js, an amazing waveform image utility that uses to Web Audio API to create super customizable...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools ElementSpy

    One part of MooTools I love is the ease of implementing events within classes. Just add Events to your Implements array and you can fire events anywhere you want -- these events are extremely helpful. ScrollSpy and many other popular MooTools plugins would...

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!