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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Introducing MooTools LinkAlert

    One of my favorite Firefox plugins is called LinkAlert. LinkAlert shows the user an icon when they hover over a special link, like a link to a Microsoft Word DOC or a PDF file. I love that warning because I hate the surprise...

  • 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!