How do I do mv original.filename new.original.filename without retyping the original filename?
I would imagine being able to do something like mv -p=new. original.filename or perhaps mv original.filename new.~ or whatever - but I can't see anything like this after looking at man mv / info mv pages.
Of course, I could write a shell script to do this, but isn't there an existing command/flag for it?
In Bash and zsh you can do this with Brace Expansion. This simply expands a list of items in braces. For example:
# echo {vanilla,chocolate,strawberry}-ice-cream
vanilla-ice-cream chocolate-ice-cream strawberry-ice-cream
So you can do your rename as follows:
mv {,new.}original.filename
as this expands to:
mv original.filename new.original.filename