Different rename command and usage, depending on Linux distribution

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on November 1st 2023 - Listed in Linux

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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.

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