Podcasting What Geeks Really Want To Hear

Here’s the ‘rename.pl’ script I mentioned in Ep. #56, originally written my Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington in “The Perl Cookbook” (Chapter 9.9, Renaming Files, O’Reilly, 1999)

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

# Usage: rename perlexpr [files]
($op = shift) || die “Usage: rename perlexpr [filenames]\n”;
if (!@ARGV) {

    @ARGV = ;

    chop(@ARGV);

}

for (@ARGV) {

    $was = $_;

    eval $op;

    next if (-e $_);

    die $@ if $@;

    rename($was,$_) unless $was eq $_;

}

Note: I added the 3rd line in the for loop, “next if (-e $_);” to prevent clobbering already existing files.

Some common cases where I use this:

Lowercase all filenames:

• rename.pl ‘tr/A-Z/a-z/’ *

Change spaces to underscores:


• rename.pl ‘s/\s/_/g’ *

Change JPEG to jpg:


• rename.pl ‘s/\.jpeg$/\.jpg/i’ *.jpeg

Zero pad numbers in filenames (ie. ‘blah_1.jpg’ to ‘blah_01.jpg’):


• rename.pl ‘s/_(\d)\./_$1\./’ *

Clean up pesky downloads:


• rename.pl ‘s/.xvid//i’ *
  
• rename.pl ‘s/.hdvt//i’ *

Clean up filenames:


• rename.pl “s/\’//” *
  
• rename.pl ‘s/\”//’ *
  
• rename.pl ‘s/[\s,_]//’ *