Where art thou 'rename'

[Paul Johnson]

On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 1:41 PM, Romain Kang <romain at kzsu.stanford.edu> wrote:
> Here's something posted to USENET ca. 1991.  I've been carrying around
> my own copy ever since:
>
> #! /usr/local/bin/perl
> $op = shift;
> for (@ARGV) {
>    $was = $_;
>    eval $op;
>    die $@ if $@;
>    rename($was,$_) unless $was eq $_;
> }
>
> --

I've been using this same scritp since 1995.  It is from the Unix
Powertools examples, I think.  Anyway, my version has some usage
examples at the top.  I don't think people could figure it out without
them.  If you know perl or sed s/before/after/ this will be familiar
to you.
###########################

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# rename script examples from lwall:
#       rename 's/\.orig$//' *.orig
#       rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/ unless /^Make/' *
#       rename '$_ .= ".bad"' *.f
#       rename 'print "$_: "; s/foo/bar/ if <stdin> =~ /^y/i' *

$op = shift;
for (@ARGV) {
       $was = $_;
       eval $op;
       die $@ if $@;
rename($was,$_) unless $was eq $_;
}


##########################

Here are some examples I regularly do after downloading things

## replace spaces with _ in all file names ending in mp3

rename s/\ /_/g *.mp3

(recall the g means "for all instances". Without it, it only does first one).

## Change " - " to "-"

rename s/\ - \ /-/ g *

## THis accepts regular expressions, so you can use ^ and $ in a handy way.

### Insert "My" at beginning of all file names

rename s/^/My/ *

### Add "-orig" to end of all file names

rename s/$/-orig/ *

Anything you can do with Perl/sed and regex



-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas