I'm not really sure how to phrase this, and maybe that's why I can't find anything, 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.
Best Answer