Different rename command and usage, depending on Linux distribution

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on November 1st 2023 - Listed in Linux

When using tito to build a local (-only) SRPM or RPM package, the resulting package file contains multiple suffixes, including the current git commit:

root@centos7 /opt/mypackage # tito build --srpm -o /tmp/tito/ --offline --test
Creating output directory: /tmp/tito
Building package [mypackage-1.1.18-1]
Wrote: /tmp/tito/mypackage-git-3.ea801b1.tar.gz
Wrote: /tmp/tito/mypackage-1.1.18-1.el7.git.7.ea801b1.src.rpm

That's information I do not need for the final package name.

File renaming with rename command

Easy, I thought. I created an empty file with the same file name on my local machine (running Linux Mint) to do some local tests.

ckadm@mintp ~ $ mkdir -p /tmp/tito
ckadm@mintp ~ $ touch /tmp/tito/mypackage-1.1.18-1.el7.git.7.ea801b1.src.rpm

ckadm@mintp /tmp/tito $ ls -la
total 24
drwxrwxr-x 2 ckadm ckadm 4096 Nov 1 13:39 ./
drwxrwxrwt 29 root root 20480 Nov 1 13:39 ../
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ckadm ckadm 0 Nov 1 13:39 mypackage-1.1.18-1.el7.git.7.ea801b1.src.rpm

Then I used my beloved rename command to remove the git relevant pars of the file name:

ckadm@mintp ~ $ rename "s/.git.*/.src.rpm/" /tmp/tito/*.src.rpm

This perfectly worked and now shows the src rpm file with the wanted file name:

ckadm@mintp /tmp/tito $ ls -la
total 24
drwxrwxr-x 2 ckadm ckadm 4096 Nov 1 13:43 ./
drwxrwxrwt 29 root root 20480 Nov 1 13:39 ../
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ckadm ckadm 0 Nov 1 13:43 mypackage-1.1.18-1.el7.src.rpm

rename: not enough arguments

But surprise, surprise when the same rename command ran in a GitLab pipeline which uses CentOS 7, Rocky Linux 8 and Rocky Linux 9; the pipeline failed because the rename command failed (on all three distributions):

I was able to reproduce the same error on a CentOS 7 VM:

root@centos7 ~ # mkdir -p /tmp/tito
root@centos7 ~ # touch /tmp/tito/mypackage-1.1.18-1.el7.git.7.ea801b1.src.rpm
root@centos7 ~ # cd /tmp/tito/
root@centos7 /tmp/tito # rename "s/.git.*/.src.rpm/" mypackage-1.1.18-1.el7.git.7.ea801b1.src.rpm
rename: not enough arguments

Usage:
rename [options] expression replacement file...

Options:
-v, --verbose    explain what is being done
-s, --symlink    act on symlink target

-h, --help     display this help and exit
-V, --version output version information and exit

For more details see rename(1).

rename is prename on EL distributions

It turns out there are two different rename commands in the Linux world:

rename from util-linux package, which is by default installed on EL (Enterprise Linux) based distributions such as Fedora, CentOS, RedHat, RockyLinux et al
rename as Perl script, which is by default installed on Debian based distributions and their derivatives, such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc.

There's a great difference in between these two commands. The latter, the Perl script, supports sophisticated renaming with PCRE (Perl Regular Expressions) - which I used above.

So how can this be solved in my pipeline using CentOS and Rocky Linux now? By installing the package containing the same Perl script! The package and also the command is called prename on EL distributions.

root@centos7 /tmp/tito # yum install prename
[...]
Installed:
prename.noarch 0:1.9-5.el7

Complete!

root@centos7 /tmp/tito # prename "s/.git.*/.src.rpm/" mypackage-1.1.18-1.el7.git.7.ea801b1.src.rpm

root@centos7 /tmp/tito # ls -la mypackage*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Nov 1 14:16 mypackage-1.1.18-1.el7.src.rpm

And it worked! =)

After adjusting the GitLab pipeline jobs (.gitlab-ci.yml) the pipeline ran through again.

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