Hey guys interesting problem here. I've been going through all my movies, pictures, mp3's etc and I'm finding that if I had a program that let me search/replace certain characters within the file names I would finish cleaning them up much much faster.

Generally I'm aiming at removing underscores and replacing with spaces or making sure there are "dashes" with spaces.

Anything out there you use for this kind of functionality?

6/7/2007 3:40:31 PM

Sounds like a simple scripting task.

Or, a simple Java/.NET console program.

6/7/2007 4:32:10 PM

for f in *mp3; do mv $f "`echo $f | sed -e 's/_/ /'`"; done

unless you use windows, in which case you'll have to find some a program or something

6/7/2007 4:51:14 PM

^ Cygwin

6/7/2007 4:51:35 PM

I've found this

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/flexrenamer.html

+ a little regexp knowledge is super super fast for doing batch file renaming and modification.

So I like to format my songs xx - yyyyyy where xx is the track number...and if I get a group of mp3s that are xx. yyyyy or xx.yyyyy (where the '.' is a literal period, not the regexp period) then it's pretty fast to search on

(\d)(\d). and replace with $1$2 -


Say 1 out of 20 files won't convert to what you expect for some reason (ie, the regexp doesn't match well), well, in the GUI you can select all but that file to convert, then do that one by hand, or whatever.

6/7/2007 4:59:56 PM

for a graphical windows program: bulk rename utility

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/bulkrename.html

official site is down for some reason

6/7/2007 7:51:44 PM

For pictures, cause I go through thousands of them and process the raw data, I use the "browser" feature in CS photoshop. You can do batch renames in any way you want. Not sure if you can do it for other types of files.

6/7/2007 10:06:49 PM

just dl Active Perl for windows, and write a short script.

6/7/2007 10:22:08 PM

Do not download active perl. I know perl, and did the same thing, then realized Flexible Renamer is any perl script you could every write to do this, ON STERIODS.

6/7/2007 10:52:04 PM