Here’s a common problem. You untar an archive and it contains a large number of files that end .jpeg. You need them to have a .jpg extension. At first glance, you might be tempted to try this:
mv *.jpeg *.jpg

Give it a try and you will find it doesn’t work. The correct way to change the extension is to iterate over all of the files. Let’s start with the following:

dcolon@dcolonbuntu:/tmp/foobar$ ls
friday.jpeg  monday.jpeg  Saturday.jpeg  sunday.jpeg  Thursday.jpeg  Tuesday.jpeg  WEDNESDAY.jpeg
dcolon@dcolonbuntu:/tmp/foobar$

Once in the loop, you need to save the filename before the extension. I use a temporary variable and awk to extract it.

Here is my solution:

dcolon@dcolonbuntu:/tmp/foobar$ for i in *.jpeg
> do
>    basefilename=$(echo $i | awk -F.jpeg '{print $1}')
>    mv "$i" "$basefilename.jpg"
> done
dcolon@dcolonbuntu:/tmp/foobar$ ls
friday.jpg  monday.jpg  Saturday.jpg  sunday.jpg  Thursday.jpg  Tuesday.jpg  WEDNESDAY.jpg
dcolon@dcolonbuntu:/tmp/foobar$

I use double quotes around the variable names to compensate for filenames with spaces. In the awk statement I use the entire replacement pattern as my field separator. Using -F. will fail if you have a filename like foo.bar.jpeg.