Tag Archives: rename

CLI

Rename files for proper sorting in Linux

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I often come across files than are named 1..9 and then go to 10…99. The problem is many Linux programs begin with 1, then go to 10, etc. The sorting is wrong. Fortunately the rename command comes to our rescue:

rename 's/\d+/sprintf("%05d", $&)/e' *.jpg

Running the above command looks for numbers in the name of JPG files (in the current directory) and renames the file to ensure there are 5 digits in the filename. Now, instead of 1.jpg, your file will be named 00001.jpg. Handy.

Thanks to this forum for the information.

CLI

Add prefix to filenames in bash

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A quick handy little way to add a prefix to files in bash (taken from here)

for f in * ; do mv "$f" "PRE_$f" ; done

In my case I wanted to rename all sub-100 filenames to have an extra zero so sorting played nicely with filenames beginning with 100+. To accomplish this I found about the rename command (thanks to this site.)  The command I used to enforce natural sorting was the following:

rename 's/\d+/sprintf("%03d", $&)/e' *

The command looked for anything beginning with a number, then used sprintf to make the number 3 digits. The asterisk instructed the rename command to work on every file. Success.

 

CLI

Use BASH to append an incremental suffix to directories

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In migrating Splunk indexes I came across the need to add an incrementing suffix of _(numbers) to a bunch of directories. For example, renaming directories

test
test1
test2
test3

to

test_100
test1_101
test2_102
test3_103

After a bunch of searching I settled on this approach of using a simple bash loop to accomplish this:

I=100; for F in db_*; do mv $F $F\_$I; I=$((I+1)); done

There is an initial variable, I, which is set to 100. The for loop goes through each file beginning with db_ and then renames it adding the proper suffix in the iteration (_###). The last step is to increment the value of I.

Replace I for whatever you want you suffix to begin with and change db_* with whatever the criteria for the files you want to rename are. Simple, but it works.