adrian kok wrote: > Hi Phil > > thank you > > But I have several hundred those pattern directories! > > I did think to cat those directories in a file > "olddir" > > eg: > > dir-192.168.30.0 > dir-192.168.30.144 > dir-192.168.30.184 > ........................................ > > and sed 's/dir-192.168/dir-10.0/g' olddir > newdir > > but i don't know how to move > > rename the directories in olddir to newdir > > Thank you again > > > Assuming dir-192.168* are all in one directory level, cd to that dir: for olddir in `ls -1 | grep dir-192.168` do newdir=`echo $olddir | sed 's/^dir-192.168/dir-10.0/'` mv $olddir $newdir done -- Toby Bluhm Midwest Instruments Inc. 30825 Aurora Road Suite 100 Solon Ohio 44139 440-424-2240