Re: Human-readable file sorting

[Yuri Khan]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 3:31 AM, Marcin Borkowski <address@hidden> wrote:

>> $ mmv 'prefix*.jpg' 'prefix0#1.jpg'
>
> What about thumbnails?  Metadata kept in seperate files by image viewing
> programs?

Those are caches and should be invalidated by the rename.


> That wasn't too painful, but it was too simple. (Still, thanks for
> teaching me that mmv command - nice!)

Perl comes with a handy script rename(1) which performs multi-file
renames by applying a Perl regexp substitution, optionally filtering
by wildcard:

$ rename 's/^prefix(.*?)\.jpg$/prefix0$1.jpg/'


The util-linux package contains another utility, also named rename(1).
Its man page explicitly gives this use case as an example:

       Given the files foo1, ..., foo9, foo10, ..., foo278, the commands

              rename foo foo0 foo?
              rename foo foo0 foo??

       will turn them into foo001, ..., foo009, foo010, ..., foo278.