Braces in general are great for all sorts of tasks. The general principle is that it duplicates arguments, with changes. Thus, foo/bar/{a,b,c} expands out t

Braces in general are great for all sorts of tasks. The general principle is that it duplicates arguments, with changes. Thus, foo/bar/{a,b,c} expands out to foo/bar/a foo/bar/b foo/bar/c and you can also use {1..9} to expand to all the numbers between 1 and 9 (inclusive). Here are some ways I commonly use it: - Create lots of subdirectories at once: mkdir -p test/{a,b,c}/{1..4} - Rename/copy files (as in parent comment) - Removing lots of randomly named files, with common elements: rm {a,d,f,gr}* (this will remove all files starting with those prefixes...note that it will not delete other files starting with 'g', only those with 'gr')