BASH Wildcard Expansion

Posted by Aaron Copley on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Aaron Copley
Published on 2011-01-11T22:29:38Z Indexed on 2011/01/11 22:55 UTC
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bash

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wildcard

I'm not really sure how to phrase this, and maybe that's why I can't find any thing, but I want to reuse the values enumerated by a wildcard in a command. Is this possible?

Scenario:
$ ls /dir 1 2 3 Contents of /dir are directories 1, 2, and 3.

$ cp /dir/*/file . Results in file being copied from /dir/1 /dir/2 and /dir/3 to here.

What I would like to do is copy the files to a new destination name based on the wildcard expansion.

$ cp /dir/*/file ???-file Would result in /dir/*/file being copied to 1-file, 2-file, and 3-file. What I can't figured out is the ??? portion to tell BASH I want to use the wildcard expanded values.

Using the wildcard in the target nets a cp error: cp: target `*-file' is not a directory. Is there something else in bash that can be used here?

The find command has {} to use with -exec which is similar to what I am looking for above.

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