To be compliant with a naming convention, changing the name of a PV should be a "trivial" operation.
That is true particularly for PV that are not used in higher level software (seq, feedback, info chart, etc)
Let's focus just for a moment on autosave.
Can the req file, generate itself "automatically"?
dbgrep *O > myfile.req
could do the trick, if you naming convention appends "O" at the end of the output records.
Unfortunately redirection on dbgrep doesn't work since 3.14.10...
Do redirection on dbgrep work in 3.14.12.3+ ?
Of course the req file can be generated manually starting with dbl * > dblist.raw
How do you generate you req file after a simple PV name change?
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Emmanuel