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Date: Mon, 20 Oct 1997 11:23:37 -0500
From: Jonathan Lemon <jlemon@americantv.com>
To: abbott on blue <jabbott@blue.pca.state.mn.us>
Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Unix question.  Regular expressions in commands?
References: <28262143@toto.iv> <3.0.3.32.19971020101324.00a53e90@blue.pca.state.mn.us>
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On Oct 10, 1997 at 10:13:24AM -0500, abbott on blue wrote:
> I guess this is kind of a newbie unix question.  I have just learned about
> regular expressions within perl and so am trying to use them everyplace. :-)
> 
> >From a command line what I would like to do is....
> # mv *.[dump asc dat txt clean] tablecreation
> 
> but this does not work.  I end up having to...
> # mv *.dump tablecreation
> # mv *.asc tablecreation
> # mv *.dat tablecreation
> # mv *.txt tablecreation
> # mv *.clean tablecreation
> 
> Is there anyway to do regular expression matching within commands?  

Depends on the shell you use.  With tcsh, you can do the following:

    mv *.{dump,asc,dat,txt,clean} tablecreation

I don't think this is possible with sh; other shells may provide the 
same functionality but with different syntax.
--
Jonathan