small programming question

[Toralf Lund]

Claude Jones wrote:

>Could someone help. I have chosen a bad naming convention for a long list, and 
>I need to make a small alteration. The list looks like the following
>001-Fig 1-1.jpg   
>013-Fig 4-4a.jpg  
>024-Fig 5-6.jpg   
>035-Fig 5-17.jpg
>etc...
>I would like to add a 0 to each group of three numbers at the beginning of 
>each name so that 001-Fig 1-1.jpg becomes 0010-Fig 1--1.jpg for example.
>Could someone help me with the quick way to do this? 
>  
>
How about

perl -pi~ -e 's/^[0-9]/0$&/' yourfile

?

(Replaces a digit at the start of a line with 0 followed by the orignal 
digit. Backup file in yourfile~)

- Toralf