"find" feature request

[Adam Tomjack]

the "info find" command told me to mail suggestions to this address.

I recently used GNU find to rename a buch of files by prepending a string to 
the filename.  It was a pain in the ass to say the least.  While I find it 
amazing that anything I can think of can be done with the GNU utilities, I 
think that some combinations of commands could be expressed in a simpler 
form.  I've stumpled upon a very awkward combination of commands that could 
be cleaned up.  

Find expands the string "{}" into the filename when you use -exec, however 
the filenames all had a ./ in front of them.  I wanted to say
$ find . -name '*' -exec mv {} Moby-{}
however this would have been equivalent to:
$ mv ./filename Moby-./filename
This obviously doesn't work.  I couldn't use backticks either because they 
get expanded by the shell that runs find before find gets a chance to expand 
the "{}"  So I had to use find to -exec a new shell whose parameters included 
backticks.  By doing this, the "{}" was expanded before the new shell I 
invoked got a chance to work it's backtick majick.  My final command was this:
$ find . -name '*' -exec sh -c "mv \`echo {} | sed s/^..//\`  Moby-\`echo {} 
| sed s/^..//\`"  \;

>From a users standpoint, this is an absurdly complicated command and it would 
have been much easier if the -printf option affected the expansion of "{}" or 
if there were a new option ( say -eprintf ) separate from -printf that would 
affect the "{}"

Thanks for your consideration,
Adam


-- 
Adam Tomjack
address@hidden
http://www.adamtj.com