Setting up this environment is a classic case for xargs, where my inputs were Pretty well count on xargs to be there when you need it.

To 074, which is what I wanted all along.) xargsĪs mentioned, rename doesn't come installed on every machine, but you can So 74 gets renamed to 0074 and then truncated Semicolon: one to prepend two zeroes to every filename, the second to strip allīut the last three characters. (Here I use a hack involving two regular expressions chained together with a That you'll find preinstalled on some but not all *nix machines, and naturallyįirst off, I forgot to add leading zeroes to those files I created before, so The smoothest experience for simple tasks is rename.

(I'll talk about that little piece of magic shortly.) rename Tool, but learning a few tricks off the top of your head can tip the balance inįavour of automation and save a lot of time.įirst, for demonstration purposes, I'll make a whole lot of files.

Now, there's always a tradeoff of number of files vs.Ĭomplexity where the balance of time spent makes sense to reach for an automated Every now and then, I find myself facing a giant pile of files that need

Bulk rename files