Running a command over several files and keep the same name - linux

Question

How can I run a shell command on several files in linux/mac while keeping the same name (excluding the extension) ?
e.g. let's assume that I want to compile a list of files using a command to some other files with the same name :
{command} [name].less [same-name].css

Answer 1

EDIT: Supposing, more generally, that the two targets are located in two different paths, say, "path/to/folder2" and "path/to/folder3" and keeping in mind you can always specify the list used in the for cycle, you can try:
for i in $(ls path/to/folder3 | grep .less); do . /path/to/folder1/script.sh $(echo "path/to/folder3/$i $( echo "path/to/folder2/$i" | sed -e s/.less/.css/)") ; done
Still sorry for the brutality and perhaps non-elegant solution.

Answer 2

You can do something like this:
ls sameName.*
or simply
ls same* > list_of_filenams_starting_with_SAME.txt

Answer 3

IMHO, the more concise, performant and intuitive solution is to use GNU Parallel. Your command becomes:
parallel command {} {.}.css ::: *.less
So, for example, let's say your "command" is ls -l, and you have these files in your directory:
Freddy Frog.css
Freddy Frog.less
a.css
a.less
then your command would be
parallel ls -l {} {.}.css ::: *.less
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark staff 0 7 Aug 08:09 Freddy Frog.css
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark staff 0 7 Aug 08:09 Freddy Frog.less
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark staff 0 7 Aug 08:09 a.css
-rw-r--r-- 1 mark staff 0 7 Aug 08:09 a.less
The benefits are firstly that it is a nice, concise syntax and a one-liner. Secondly, it'll run commands in parallel using as many cores as your CPU(s) have so it will be faster. If you do that, you may want the -k option to keep the outputs in order from the different commands.
If, you need it to run across many folders in a hierarchy, you can pipe the filenames in like this:
find <somepleace> -name \*.less | parallel <command> {} {.}.css
To understand these last two points (piping in and order), look at this example:
seq 1 10 | parallel echo
6
7
8
5
4
9
3
2
1
10
And now with -k to keep the order:
seq 1 10 | parallel -k echo
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
If, for some reason, you want to run the jobs sequentially one after the other, just add the switch -j 1 to the parallel command to set the number of parallel jobs to 1.
Try this out on your Linux machine as GNU Parallel is generally installed there. On the Mac under OS X , the easiest way to install GNU Parallel is with homebrew - please ask before trying if you are not familiar.