small programming question

[Bob Chiodini]

On Mon, 2005-05-23 at 03:43 -0400, 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? 
> -- 
> Claude Jones
> Bluemont, VA, USA
> 
Claude,

Are you attempting to rename files or edit a list of file names?

For the latter, you could use gedit and replace all occurrences "-F"
with "0-F".

For the former you would need to script it.  Something like:

for i in *.jpg; do newname=`echo $i | sed s/-/0-/`; mv "$i" "$newname"; done

The example file names given will become:

0010-Fig 1-1.jpg
0130-Fig 4-4a.jpg
0240-Fig 5-6.jpg
0350-Fig 5-17.jpg

Is that what you are looking to do?

Bob...