Intro I am no Bash expert, but in searching for an unrelated answer I came across the following snippet to add a suffix to a file: sudo mv /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.knopwob.dunst.service{,.disabled} The insight here was in the way the braces expanded to the full earlier path. I look forward to making better use of this in my command-line journeyings. I also found a nice instructive cheat sheet here: https://wiki.bash-hackers.org/syntax/expansion/brace .