File Temporary Backup/Move Functions (bash)

A lot of the time, when I’m working in a bash terminal, I find myself needing to move a file out of the way temporarily. I found myself doing this over and over again:

$ mv my-file my-file.bak

Then if I wanted to put the file back:

$ mv my-file.bak my-file

Now, with tab completion, this was a fairly quick process, but I still got tired of the repetition. Therefore, I did what any programmer would do: I wrote a function to do it for me! (Well, technically two functions.)

You’ll find them below. Feel free to take them, use them, change them, and even make suggestions for improvements or alternatives. To use them, simply call bak or unbak and give the file name. There is no check for proper arguments or anything. (I trust myself to use this function correctly.) This was just a quick hack to get the job done without taking to much time away from my real work.

bak () {
    mv $1 $1.bak
}

unbak () {
    length=$((${#1} - 4))
    mv $1 ${1:0:$length}
}