Alternative for AWK use

Question

I'd love to have a more elegant solution for a mass rename of files, as shown below. Files were of format DEV_XYZ_TIMESTAMP.dat and we needed them as T-XYZ-TIMESTAMP.dat. In the end, I copied them all (to be on the same side) into renamed folder:

ls -l *dat|awk '{system("cp " $10 " renamed/T-" substr($10, index($10, "_")+1))}'

So, first I listed all dat files, then picked up 10th column (file name) and executed a command using awk's system function. The command was essentially copying of original filename into renamed folder with new file name. New file name was created by removing (awk substring function) prefix before (including) _ and adding "T-" prefix.

Effectively:

cp DEV_file.dat renamed/T-file.dat

Is there a way to use cp or mv together with some regex rules to achieve the same in a bit more elegant way?

Thx

Answer 1

You may use this script:

for file in *.dat; do
   f="${file//_/-}"
   mv "$file" renamed/T-"${f#*-}"
done

You must avoid parsing output of ls command.