Bash brace expansion to remove part of filename Is it possible to remove rather than adding substring to a filename using bash brace expansion? Considering the following scenario, one can add a suffix to a filename by using the below technique: mv offlineimap.conf{,.minimal} What it does is renaming `offlineimap.conf` to `offlineimap.conf.minimal` which is very handy esp. for making backup files (eg. swith `.bak` extension). But is it also possible to subtract substrings from given filenames, like so: mv offlineimap.conf.minimal{,-minimal} Here I use `-` as a hypothetical special character to substract the substring. I expect the second technique to result in `offlineimap.conf` removing the `.minimal` suffix from the name of an existing file.

To use a brace command to remove a suffix, such as `.minimal` from the file `offlineimap.conf.minimal`, use:


mv offlineimap.conf{.minimal,}


### More on brace expansion

The idea here is that brace expansion creates a series of strings using the comma-separated list of strings between the braces:


$ echo a{b,c}
ab ac


In your first use, the first of the two strings is empty:


$ echo a{,c}
a ac


In the desired solution, we switch it so that the second of the two strings is empty:


$ echo a{b,}
ab a


Or:


$ echo offlineimap.conf{.minimal,}
offlineimap.conf.minimal offlineimap.conf