3 ms·

A lot of the pain with renaming files can be mitigated using brace expansion in e.g. Bash: $ mv path/to/{orig,dest}.foo # expands into $ mv path/to/orig.

A lot of the pain with renaming files can be mitigated using brace expansion in e.g. Bash: $ mv path/to/{orig,dest}.foo # expands into $ mv path/to/orig.foo path/to/dest.foo

pmoriarty 9y ago
Your tip is appreciated, but that pales in comparison to what you could do with vim or emacs and a tool like qmv when renaming files. You could, for instance, rename by regular expressions, easily do block selections and substitutions, use complex macros, etc. The sky is really the limit. Then there are unlimited undo features of modern editors, and even branching undo histories where you can get back to a state that would be unreachable with linear undos. Finally, tools like qmv do sanity checking on your renaming plan, so that if you (for example) wind up renaming two files to the same name, it'll warn you and safely let you rename the original files and try again. As a result of the power and safety these tools provide, I no longer rename directly using my shell's renaming features (like the ones you describe) except for the absolute simplest and foolproof situations. For anything more complex, I use qmv.
- mikegerwitz 9y ago
  I appreciate the clarification. My comfort with shell (which is one of my primary languages for countless tasks) makes it a more viable option for me and blinds me to the issues many people have. That's definitely not the case for many people. I can certainly recognize the power of what you are describing. Perhaps I'll give it a try in the future. Out of curiosity: what do you find are your most compelling use cases for the tool(s)?
  - robenkleene 9y ago
    Hey Mike, I'm not the original poster, but I'm a good candidate to answer since I'm reasonably comfortable with the shell and I've been looking for a tool like Roamer/qmv specifically because of shortcomings in shell renaming (or my knowledge thereof). My most common case for this is renaming a batch of files to a different naming scheme. For example I was recently renaming 15 or so files that were named like "08/30/2017 John Smith 478939da-b172-4952-b428-d77c4f4f6674.doc" and I wanted them all to be named like "john-smith.doc". I did end up renaming them with the shell but through doing something like `for i in *; do { mv $i \`echo $i | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' | tr ' ' '-'\` } done` (I don't have the final script anymore). Which is slower to write and less elegant than the Roamer/qmv approach. But I'm very curious if there's a better approach to this problem on the shell.
    - kaushalmodi 9y ago
      Emacs (w)dired can do that in a snap.
      - robenkleene 9y ago
        Yup, agree 100%! Using `wdired` was my introduction to "editor-based file-system editing". Maintaining an emacs setup for this feature is overkill though.
ratbeard 9y ago
zmv is great for when doing mass renaming of files, in zshell. You can for example rename all .jade files to .pug with: autoload -U zmv # or put this line in your ~/.zshrc zmv -w 'src/**/*.jade' 'src/$1$2.pug' You can do a dry run by using the `-n` flag too.
- IronBacon 9y ago
  The same thing can be done in a kinda portable way with the pre/post substitution/expansion operators (at the moment don't recall their correct name): for a in **/*.jade; do echo mv "$a" "${a%jade}pug"; done If I'm not wrong it should work in Bash and Ksh too (bar the double * expansion), this when I don't have an Emacs at hand. In the first invocation I prefer to do a "dry run", if it looks good I proceed removing the echo. P.S. Your example above should use double quote instead of single quote, otherwise the content is not expanded by Zsh P.P.S. One recall the pre/post operator looking at the symbols on a US keyboard, the post follows the variable symbol...
  - ratbeard 9y ago
    I think the single quotes are correct, and are whats in my history. I think they're arguments to the zmv program, which itself does the expansion and $1 substitutions. Otherwise I think that $1 would be substituted once when you run it instead of for each file. I've used zmv to also reorganize the directory structure of files too, something that seems easier to do with its glob/variable replace syntax. Nice to have a cross platform option for usage in scripts though.

A lot of the pain with renaming files can be mitigated using brace expansion in e.g. Bash: $ mv path/to/{orig,dest}.foo # expands into $ mv path/to/orig.foo path/to/dest.foo

pmoriarty 9y ago

Your tip is appreciated, but that pales in comparison to what you could do with vim or emacs and a tool like qmv when renaming files. You could, for instance, rename by regular expressions, easily do block selections and substitutions, use complex macros, etc. The sky is really the limit. Then there are unlimited undo features of modern editors, and even branching undo histories where you can get back to a state that would be unreachable with linear undos. Finally, tools like qmv do sanity checking on your renaming plan, so that if you (for example) wind up renaming two files to the same name, it'll warn you and safely let you rename the original files and try again. As a result of the power and safety these tools provide, I no longer rename directly using my shell's renaming features (like the ones you describe) except for the absolute simplest and foolproof situations. For anything more complex, I use qmv.

mikegerwitz 9y ago
I appreciate the clarification. My comfort with shell (which is one of my primary languages for countless tasks) makes it a more viable option for me and blinds me to the issues many people have. That's definitely not the case for many people. I can certainly recognize the power of what you are describing. Perhaps I'll give it a try in the future. Out of curiosity: what do you find are your most compelling use cases for the tool(s)?
- robenkleene 9y ago
  Hey Mike, I'm not the original poster, but I'm a good candidate to answer since I'm reasonably comfortable with the shell and I've been looking for a tool like Roamer/qmv specifically because of shortcomings in shell renaming (or my knowledge thereof). My most common case for this is renaming a batch of files to a different naming scheme. For example I was recently renaming 15 or so files that were named like "08/30/2017 John Smith 478939da-b172-4952-b428-d77c4f4f6674.doc" and I wanted them all to be named like "john-smith.doc". I did end up renaming them with the shell but through doing something like `for i in *; do { mv $i \`echo $i | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' | tr ' ' '-'\` } done` (I don't have the final script anymore). Which is slower to write and less elegant than the Roamer/qmv approach. But I'm very curious if there's a better approach to this problem on the shell.
  - kaushalmodi 9y ago
    Emacs (w)dired can do that in a snap.
    - robenkleene 9y ago
      Yup, agree 100%! Using `wdired` was my introduction to "editor-based file-system editing". Maintaining an emacs setup for this feature is overkill though.

ratbeard 9y ago

zmv is great for when doing mass renaming of files, in zshell. You can for example rename all .jade files to .pug with: autoload -U zmv # or put this line in your ~/.zshrc zmv -w 'src/**/*.jade' 'src/$1$2.pug' You can do a dry run by using the `-n` flag too.

IronBacon 9y ago
The same thing can be done in a kinda portable way with the pre/post substitution/expansion operators (at the moment don't recall their correct name): for a in **/*.jade; do echo mv "$a" "${a%jade}pug"; done If I'm not wrong it should work in Bash and Ksh too (bar the double * expansion), this when I don't have an Emacs at hand. In the first invocation I prefer to do a "dry run", if it looks good I proceed removing the echo. P.S. Your example above should use double quote instead of single quote, otherwise the content is not expanded by Zsh P.P.S. One recall the pre/post operator looking at the symbols on a US keyboard, the post follows the variable symbol...
- ratbeard 9y ago
  I think the single quotes are correct, and are whats in my history. I think they're arguments to the zmv program, which itself does the expansion and $1 substitutions. Otherwise I think that $1 would be substituted once when you run it instead of for each file. I've used zmv to also reorganize the directory structure of files too, something that seems easier to do with its glob/variable replace syntax. Nice to have a cross platform option for usage in scripts though.