renaming multiple files using regex and awk under Unix

[erixire]

Hi,

I want to use this simple awk script to rename some files in a directory:

awk '{gsub (\4+\, "_" print}'

which replace every group of character "4" with a single underscore "_". So, for example:

toto4444.txt become toto_.txt

But I don't know how to combine this to use in a shell to do something like this:

mv *.* `the result of the awk expression`

Is it possible? Maybe not!
Thanks for the help

 

[marsd]

for all in `ls $DIR/$pat`
do
allnew=`echo $all | awk ' {gsub(/4+/,"",$0) '`
mv $DIR/$all $DIR/$allnew
echo "Renamed $all to $allnew."
done

To test comment out the fourth line.