I will be performing a task on several directories, each containing a large number of files (2500+) that follow a regular naming convention:
YYYY_MM_DD_XX.foo_bar.A.B.some_different_stuff.EXT
What I would like to do is automatically discover the part of the filenames that are common to all 2500 files, so that a script could use that as a base name. In practice, this will end up being "YYYY_MM_DD_XX.foo_bar."
I figured out as far as I'll have to use ls to get all the filenames, but there's no command that I know of that will find the largest substring that exists among a large number of strings. I thought perhaps there would be some sed guru out there that would find this problem trivial. You sed experts always blow my mind.