Warp wrote:
>   Why would one want to do pattern substitution?

Personally, I usually wind up wanting to do complex pattern manipulation on 
file names, rather than file contents.

Stuff like "go through these directories full of image files, figure out 
whether it's months, days, or hours that's changing, rename all the files to 
match the time they were taking excluding the parts of the date that's the 
same for all the files, tack on a letter saying which camera took the 
picture, then another letter to disambiguate multiple photos taken within 
the same minute.   Also, copy any sequence of three or more photos taken 
within 5 seconds of each other with a one-minute gap on either side to a 
separate directory to be stitched together as a panorama."

That's gonna be rough to do with command-line tools too. Not impossible, but 
certainly something easier in an actual scripting language better than Bash.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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