Bash中的“欺骗”文件扩展名

Question

Is there a way to "spoof" the file extension of a file in bash for consumption by another program? I can think of doing some shell scripting and making lots of soft-links, but that isn't very scalable.

Let's imagine I have a program I'm trying to use that requires input files to be of a specific file extension, and it has no method of turning off this check.

Answer 1

You could make a fifo with the requisite extension and cat any other file type into it. So, if your crazy program needs to see files that end in .funky , you can do this:

mkfifo file.funky
cat someotherfile > file.funky &
someprogram file.funky

Answer 2

Create a symbolic link for each file you want to have a particular extension, then pass the name of the symlink to the command.

For example suppose you have files with names of the form *.foo and you need to refer to them with extensions of .bar :

for file in *.foo ; do
    ln -s $file _$$_$file.bar
done

I precede each symlink name with _$$_ to avoid the possibility of colliding with an existing file name (you don't want to do ln -s file.foo file.bar if file.bar already exists).

With a little more programming, your script can keep track of which symlinks it created and, if you like, clean them up after executing the command.

This assumes, as you stated in the question, that the command can't be forced to accept a different extension.

You could, without too much difficulty, create a wrapper script that replaces the command in question, creating the symlinks, invoking the command, and cleaning up after itself automatically.