Comment by mtift

4 years ago

I have an overly-aggressive function in my .bashrc to rename all files in the current directory:

  # Rename all files in a directory
  rn() {
    rename "s/ /-/g" *
    rename "s/_/-/g" *
    rename "s/–/-/g" *
    rename "s/://g" *
    rename "s/\(//g" *
    rename "s/\)//g" *
    rename "s/\[//g" *
    rename "s/\]//g" *
    rename 's/"//g' *
    rename "s/'//g" *
    rename "s/,//g" *
    rename "y/A-Z/a-z/" *
    rename "s/---/--/g" *
    rename "s/-‎--/--/g" *
  }

I use this all the time, especially when I download files.

35 comments

mtift

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tgbugs  4 years ago

Word of warning from hard experience: rn is a really dangerous thing to name a function because it is one char away from rm.

donio  4 years ago

https://github.com/dharple/detox is a nice tool for this. Sane defaults but configurable.

In addition to CLI I use it from emacs dired-mode too:

    (defun my-dired-detox ()
      (interactive)
      (dired-do-shell-command "detox" nil (dired-get-marked-files))
      (revert-buffer))

I bind it to "_" in dired-mode.

OskarS  4 years ago

Overly aggresive is right! I don't know if this is genius or deranged! I'm leaning towards genius and stealing the idea.

By the way: what's your beef with en dashes? I mean, if it was "everything should be 'HYPHEN-MINUS' (U+002D)", then fine, but why specifically en dashes and not em dashes?

  • michaelt  4 years ago

    > By the way: what's your beef with en dashes?

    Of all the changes in that list, removing the character that doesn't appear on a standard keyboard seems like the least controversial...

  • mtift  4 years ago

    I totally agree that for some people, this could be a terrible command to have around. However, I know that it has been working for me for about 8+ years or so. I almost always run in in my ~/Downloads folder on files that I don't really care about. I download a lot of academic papers and books, and this just saves me a lot of time to put files in the format I like: author--paper-title.pdf. And that's part of the reason why I make all of the dashes the same, so if I'm opening something by an author, I can easily autocomplete and not have to remember how to make other sorts of dashes on the command line.

    • OskarS  4 years ago

      For a download folder in particular, this does sound like a great idea. You'd break the list in the browser or whatever, but who cares about that?

niccl  4 years ago

I use this snippet, to change spaces to underscore for directories and files in the current directory and below. Haven't made it a function yet, but should. I got it from stack overflow or somewhere, but no attribution. Thanks to whoever did it first:

   find . -depth -name '* *' | while IFS= read -r f ; do mv -i "$f" "$(dirname "$f")/$(basename "$f"|tr ' ' _)" ; done

BiteCode_dev  4 years ago

Thanks to all the comments in this threads, I now have "sudo apt install rename detox" in my install script, and:

    normalize_names() {
        rename "s/-/_/g" *
        detox -s lower *
    }

in my .bashrc.

I've thrown some edge cases at it, and it handles it super well. It deals with consecutive "_", remove leading garbage, normalize unicode, and even prevents naming conflicts by opting out early.

Thanks you.

l0b0  4 years ago

If you're a developer you're doing yourself a big disservice by not learning how to deal with special characters.

  • mtift  4 years ago

    I agree. I am a developer and I know how to deal with special characters. But this isn't something I use professionally. I just prefer not to have to deal with special characters in the pdfs, m4as, txts, and other files that I use on a daily basis. When I write papers, I'll write ū or Ñ or ç or whatever (incidentally, I have a lot of shortcuts in my .vimrc for those). I would not say I am "afraid" to use spaces in filenames, but I get a certain satisfaction storing academic papers in the author--paper-title.pdf format and my notes in author--paper-title.md because it helps me find things.

theshowmustgo  4 years ago

Nice but how do you prevent overwrites? What about directories/folders and the files in that directory/folder?

I have:

  Movie Bla (2020)
    Movie Bla (2020).mp4

But also:

  Movie_Bla_(2020)
    Movie_Bla_(2020).mp4
    Movie_Bla_(2020).srt

Would not like to lose files like the the srt.

  • mtift  4 years ago

    Yeah, sometimes I end up renaming things I don't want to, but it really doesn't happen all that often. And sometimes I throw caution to the wind, add some excitement to my life, and rename a bunch of files (not for anything professional) in some really old directory and hope I don't break anything. But I'm not aiming for perfect with this comment. I just mentioned in another comment, but the vast majority of times I run this is in my ~/Downloads folder on files I don't really worry about breaking.

Tempest1981  4 years ago

Surely you must run into conflicts now and then?

  • nybble41  4 years ago

    That's the most beautiful part! After running this script there are no more conflicts, because it just silently overwrites all but one version of the "cleaned" filename.

    (Also—that entire function is super inefficient and could be replaced with a single invocation of "rename".)

    • mtift  4 years ago

      Totally inefficient. But for me it's readable and practical. This is mostly just a convenience function for me to help store files in a format I like rather than something I need optimized. If it ever started to feel slow, sure I could optimize. But for now, when I still occasionally download a file that has some weird character and I just prefer to add another line to my function.

      1 reply →

cerved  4 years ago

I wonder if rename has an -e flag like sed. It might be worth baking this into one monolithic regex if you call this often