brad

numeric file rename

What started as me accidentally forgetting an sprintf turned into a fixer utility. If this doesn't already exist, somebody out there might find it useful...

http://bradfitz.com/programming/hacks/nrename
$ ~/bin/nrename
nrename [opts] <directory>

OPTIONS:
     --dry-run -n      Dry-run, just show what it would've done
     --verbose -v      Shows renames as they happen

DESCRIPTION:

Renames all necessary files in a directory with respect to numbers in
their filenames such that when they sort alphabetically later, their
alphabetic order is the same as their numeric order.  Essentially it
just zero-pads numbers within filenames where needed, but it can deal
with any number of digits anywhere in the filename.  For instance, these
files:

   20_foo_5.dat
   20_foo_20.dat
   5_foo_6.dat

Would normally sort:

   20_foo_20.dat
   20_foo_5.dat
   5_foo_6.dat

Which is entirely wrong.  What nrename will do is:

   05_foo_06.dat
   20_foo_05.dat
   20_foo_20.dat

Which is what you presumably wanted.

AUTHOR:
 Brad Fitzpatrick <brad@fitzpat.com>

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