[cgjoker]

I would like to substring a bunch of files that would have various names but would always end with .dct.

For example...

file1.dct
file2.dct
dog1.dct
cat1.dct

I would like to rename them all to

file1
file2
dog1
cat1

These filenames would always change though so I wouldn't be able to just do a mv.

Here is some code that I would need to incorporate into the substring function.

for DCT1 in `ls`;

do
cp $DCT1 $DCT1.dat
done

[codejockey]

How about something like this:

#!/bin/bash
for FILE in `ls`
do
    NEWFILE=`echo $FILE | sed 's/\.dct//'`
    cp $FILE $NEWFILE
done

This is only one approach, and doesn't consider any error cases (what if the file is a directory, for example?) but the code should give you the basic idea.

Hope this helps.