...making Linux just a little more fun!
Richard Neill [rn214 at hermes.cam.ac.uk]
Tue, 03 Oct 2006 00:56:29 +0100
Re file renaming (here, using "wavren", may I recommend installing the qmv and imv utilities. They are excellent. http://www.nongnu.org/renameutils/
imv filename
-> slightly faster than mv,
qmv
-> brings up an editor with columns for oldname, newname. Checks for
errors.
Best wishes,
Richard
Benjamin A. Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]
Wed, 4 Oct 2006 01:21:39 -0400
On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 12:56:29AM +0100, Richard Neill wrote:
> Re file renaming (here, using "wavren", may I recommend installing the > qmv and imv utilities. They are excellent. > http://www.nongnu.org/renameutils/ > > imv filename > -> slightly faster than mv, > > qmv > -> brings up an editor with columns for oldname, newname. Checks for > errors.
Good recommendations, Richard - thanks!
I'll add to that list, too: my own 'ren' Perl script (credit to Larry Wall for the original idea.) The script itself is short but provides huge amounts of flexibility and power by leveraging Perl's "regular expression" engine as well as Perl's 'tr' operator. You can get quite fancy with these:
# Lowercase all filenames in the current directory ren 'tr/A-Z/a-z/' * # Delete all commas, % signs, and semicolons in filenames starting with # a digit ren 'tr/,;%//d' [0-9]* # Change all '.htm' extensions to '.html' ren 's/$/l/' *.htm # ROT13-encode all the filenames that end in 'png' ren 'tr/a-zA-Z/n-za-mN-ZA-M/' *png # Swap book title and author name (separated by a dash and spaces) and # keeping the extension ren 's/^(.*?)( - )(.*)(\.\w+)$/$3$2$1$4/' * # Attach the filesize to the end of all filenames, skipping directories # and symlinks ren 's/$/"-".-s/e if -f' * # Replace digits with their German word equivalents ren 's/\d/(qw|Ein Zwei Drei Vier Funf Sechs Sieben Acht Neun|)[$&]." "/ge' * # Capitalize the first letter in each separate word in the filename, # ignoring the extension ren 's/(?<!\.)\b./\u$&/g' *
The really tricky renaming jobs require a good understanding of regular expressions, but the simple ones are easy and obvious - and in some cases (e.g., renaming large batches of files), it's nearly irreplaceable.
* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *
Benjamin A. Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]
Wed, 4 Oct 2006 01:31:27 -0400
On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 01:21:39AM -0400, Benjamin Okopnik wrote:
> > Good recommendations, Richard - thanks! > > I'll add to that list, too: my own 'ren' Perl script (credit to Larry > Wall for the original idea.)
Whoops - forgot the script itself. 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# Created by Ben Okopnik on Fri Dec 2 18:59:31 EST 1994
$do = shift or die "Usage: ", $0 =~ /([^\/]+)$/, " 'perlexpr' <file[s]>\n";
for (@ARGV){ $is = $_; eval $do; die "$@\n" if $@; rename $is, $_ unless -f }
* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *
John Karns [johnkarns at gmail.com]
Sun, 8 Oct 2006 15:51:17 -0500 (COT)
On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Benjamin A. Okopnik wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 01:21:39AM -0400, Benjamin Okopnik wrote: >> >> Good recommendations, Richard - thanks! >> >> I'll add to that list, too: my own 'ren' Perl script (credit to Larry >> Wall for the original idea.) > > Whoops - forgot the script itself.
When dealing with multiple files, the mmv utility can also be very handy, and particularly when renaming a group of files having shared substring compenents. Added features: Does some error checking to avoid overwriting any existing files, is aliased from 'mcp' to copy files, 'mad' to append files, and 'mln' to handle links.
E.g.,
mmv "abc*.*" "xyz#2.#1"
would rename "abc.txt" to "xyztxt.". (The first ???*??? matched "", and the second matched "txt".)
SYNOPSIS
mmv [-m|x|r|c|o|a|l|s] [-h] [-d|p] [-g|t] [-v|n] [--] [from to]
DESCRIPTION
Mmv moves (or copies, appends, or links, as specified) each source file
matching a from pattern to the target name specified by the to pattern.
This multiple action is performed safely, i.e. without any unexpected
deletion of files due to collisions of target names with existing file???
names or with other target names. Furthermore, before doing anything,
mmv attempts to detect any errors that would result from the entire set
of actions specified and gives the user the choice of either proceeding
by avoiding the offending parts or aborting. mmv does support large
files (LFS) but it does NOT support sparse files (i.e. it explodes
them).
Benjamin A. Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]
Sun, 8 Oct 2006 23:11:07 -0400
On Sun, Oct 08, 2006 at 03:51:17PM -0500, John Karns wrote:
> On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Benjamin A. Okopnik wrote: > > >On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 01:21:39AM -0400, Benjamin Okopnik wrote: > >> > >>Good recommendations, Richard - thanks! > >> > >>I'll add to that list, too: my own 'ren' Perl script (credit to Larry > >>Wall for the original idea.) > > > >Whoops - forgot the script itself.
I didn't mention it, but 'ren' will not overwrite existing files either (that's the "unless -f" bit in the code.) However, I agree with you: the 'mmv' suite is quite nice - I've played around with it before.
* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *
Jason Creighton [jcreigh at gmail.com]
Wed, 4 Oct 2006 23:37:24 -0600
On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 01:21:39AM -0400, Benjamin A. Okopnik wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 12:56:29AM +0100, Richard Neill wrote: > > Re file renaming (here, using "wavren", may I recommend installing the > > qmv and imv utilities. They are excellent. > > http://www.nongnu.org/renameutils/ > > > > imv filename > > -> slightly faster than mv, > > > > qmv > > -> brings up an editor with columns for oldname, newname. Checks for > > errors. > > Good recommendations, Richard - thanks!
*nods* Good tip, I'll probably end up using it in the future, although the "destination only" format (qmv -f do) seems like it'll be easier to work with in vim than the dual-column format.
> I'll add to that list, too: my own 'ren' Perl script (credit to Larry > Wall for the original idea.) The script itself is short but provides > huge amounts of flexibility and power by leveraging Perl's "regular > expression" engine as well as Perl's 'tr' operator. You can get quite > fancy with these:
Why not just use the "rename" that ships with Perl? It seems to be installed as prename on Debian etch:
~$ ls -l `which rename`
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 2006-08-05 10:44 /usr/bin/rename -> /etc/alternatives/rename
~$ ls -l /etc/alternatives/rename
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 2006-08-13 20:43 /etc/alternatives/rename -> /usr/bin/prename
~$ mkdir /tmp/foobar
~$ cd /tmp/foobar/
/tmp/foobar$ for n in {1..10}; do touch $n; done
/tmp/foobar$ ls
1 10 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
/tmp/foobar$ rename 's/^/foobar/' *
/tmp/foobar$ ls
foobar1 foobar10 foobar2 foobar3 foobar4 foobar5 foobar6 foobar7
foobar8 foobar9
/tmp/foobar$ rename 'tr/oa/zq/' *
/tmp/foobar$ ls
fzzbqr1 fzzbqr10 fzzbqr2 fzzbqr3 fzzbqr4 fzzbqr5 fzzbqr6 fzzbqr7
fzzbqr8 fzzbqr9
/tmp/foobar$ rename '$_ = reverse' *
/tmp/foobar$ ls
01rqbzzf 1rqbzzf 2rqbzzf 3rqbzzf 4rqbzzf 5rqbzzf 6rqbzzf 7rqbzzf
8rqbzzf 9rqbzzf
/tmp/foobar$
Jason Creighton
Benjamin A. Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]
Thu, 5 Oct 2006 08:15:13 -0400
On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 11:37:24PM -0600, Jason Creighton wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 01:21:39AM -0400, Benjamin A. Okopnik wrote: > > On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 12:56:29AM +0100, Richard Neill wrote: > > > Re file renaming (here, using "wavren", may I recommend installing the > > > qmv and imv utilities. They are excellent. > > > http://www.nongnu.org/renameutils/ > > > > > > imv filename > > > -> slightly faster than mv, > > > > > > qmv > > > -> brings up an editor with columns for oldname, newname. Checks for > > > errors. > > > > Good recommendations, Richard - thanks! > > nods Good tip, I'll probably end up using it in the future, although > the "destination only" format (qmv -f do) seems like it'll be easier to > work with in vim than the dual-column format. > > > I'll add to that list, too: my own 'ren' Perl script (credit to Larry > > Wall for the original idea.) The script itself is short but provides > > huge amounts of flexibility and power by leveraging Perl's "regular > > expression" engine as well as Perl's 'tr' operator. You can get quite > > fancy with these: > > Why not just use the "rename" that ships with Perl? It seems to be > installed as prename on Debian etch:
[snip] I hadn't realized they started doing that. However, I still like my solution:
ben at Fenrir:~$ grep '^use' `which rename` use strict; use Getopt::Long; ben at Fenrir:~$ wc -l `perldoc -l Getopt::Long` 1086 /usr/share/perl/5.8/Getopt/Long.pod
I prefer to load two lines of code instead of a thousand plus.
* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *
Thomas Adam [thomas.adam22 at gmail.com]
Fri, 6 Oct 2006 21:22:21 +0100
On Wed, 4 Oct 2006 23:37:24 -0600 Jason Creighton <jcreigh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why not just use the "rename" that ships with Perl? It seems to be > installed as prename on Debian etch:
It's installed with all the Debian derivates -- has been since Woody. Note that the rename command in this case is NOT the same as the one DeadRat and Fedora use, which is annoying since it means compatability is PITA.
> `` > ~$ ls -l `which rename` > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 2006-08-05 10:44 /usr/bin/rename > -> /etc/alternatives/rename > ~$ ls -l /etc/alternatives/rename
So much typing when:
readlink -f "$(which rename)"Does the same thing. ;) The reason why the alternatives system is used here is because the binary I mentioned for Redhat can also appear on Debian systems, hence the multiple-dependency hint.
-- Thomas Adam
-- "If I were a witch's hat, sitting on her head like a paraffin stove, I'd fly away and be a bat." -- Incredible String Band.