Renaming groups of files from the command prompt

helmers

One of the features don't know how to use, which I used a lot in Windows, is renaming files like this: "move *.wav *.mp3", and it would automagically understand it. Somehow I can't figure out how to do this :wink:

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Regards,
Jan Henrik Helmers

dippen · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 15 Sep 2002 Posts: 83

its allmost the same

helmers · Posted: Wed Oct 23, 2002 12:47 pm Post subject:

Okay, to make it a bit tougher, what if the files contain these letters? Any more "solid" way? :roll:

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Regards,
Helmers

progster · Apprentice Joined: 16 Jul 2002 Posts: 271

then dippens way will work as well since manwavis does not equal *wav ;-)

~Progster

helmers · Posted: Wed Oct 23, 2002 2:39 pm Post subject:

Great! Feel a bit dumb though, this have been bothering me for over a year. Guess you don't have to be smart to use 'nix

Thanks a lot for helping out!

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Regards,
Helmers

n0n · Guru Joined: 13 Jun 2002 Posts: 355

phong · Posted: Wed Oct 23, 2002 6:56 pm Post subject:

The fundamental difference here is that in IIRC dos/windows the parameters are passed to programs more or less as typed. In *nix they are expanded by the shell BEFORE passing. In this case, if you had 3 wav files in the current directory (a.wav, b.wav and c.wav), the program would recieve the exact list of wav files as its parameters. Since there are no .mp3 files, that part gets expanded to nothing. The rule for mv is if you're moving multiple files, the last parameter (the target) must be a directory, since it makes no sense to move lots of files to one target filename. In windows/dos the wildcards are interpreted by the ren command so it can say "Oh, they said *.wav and *.mp3, they want to change everything that has an extension of .wav to be .mp3 instead".

The tradeoff is that in *nix you can do the "for" loop on the command line as mentioned by n0n.
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

n0n · Guru Joined: 13 Jun 2002 Posts: 355

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

gauched · n00b Joined: 12 Jul 2002 Posts: 6 Location: SLC, Utah

Globbing can have strange effects for someone who is more familiar with the dos world. I had alot of problems with accidently moving all of my /etc/* files into /etc/X11 because I expected a doslike behavior.
To address the original question, "emerge rename" should help you do what you want to do.

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

A brief explanation of rename, as it is not initially obvious. See man for other nifty things you can do.

rename files with extension of .dat to .data (including filenames with spaces).
rename <from> <to> <files to change>
rename .dat .data *.dat
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ryan83vt · Posted: Thu Jan 30, 2003 8:30 pm Post subject:

Donovan · Posted: Sat Jun 14, 2003 4:51 pm Post subject:

'rename' is no longer a separate package in portage. However, it is installed on my system, it must be included in some other package, perhaps baseutils or something.

If you really want to mass rename, check out krename... The version in portage is outdated at moment, I filed a report - see https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22826 to emerge the newest version as of this writing...

I would say there is no limit to what you can do with that krename... you can extract attributes from the files (photo details, mp3 details) and add them as part of the file name!
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far · Posted: Sat Jun 14, 2003 5:01 pm Post subject: