Reiki Music. Video Marketing

How to rename a heap of files easily

It’s funny how things work out!
I guess I never learn this basic concept

“just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”

but I’ve never let that stop me so far – LOL

I was working on a project and was sent a bunch of files for it. But they were named quite inconsistently.

In isolation it makes no difference, but when you’re integrating them in to a website or program, it is a logistical nightmare, to have to find the exact name of each file in a series, when it should just be the next in a logical sequence.

I can’t tell you the times people have sent me web files with spaces in them, or less standard file extensions, or I’ve needed to change an entire website from static html, to dynamic php, and not wanted to rename every file manually. Or when people use 4 letter file extensions, which just complicates everything.

(NB it does NOT do file conversion, only file renaming inlcuding file extensions)

It’s just one of those things that keeps coming up and you think “if only” but you do it manually, every time.

So again, I could have just spent 30 minutes renaming them manually, but I thought, as this happens quite a lot, it was worth spending an hour, to write a utility to do it, a darn site quicker and more reliably.

Well naturally, the universe decided it should take 16 hours, so 3am and counting, version 0.01 started to be finished.

And yes, I used it on my what would have taken me 30 minutes to do manually project, and it did it under 30 seconds. That’s the great thing about automation – it is fast once it’s set up!

NB This is not a utility for the feint hearted. You have total control and you can mess things up if you have no regard for file naming or language.

That said it only works on a single level folder, and I STRONGLY suggest backing that folder up first, simply by copying it, and then deleting it if the renaming goes as planned. If you know what you are doing this is not an issue. But if filenames are like Clingon to you, then you should probably copy first. A future version may make a backup copy for you, I am not sure where this utility may take us. In future version I may add a file extension and prefix adder. I just remembered when i woke up, these are other things that happen a lot, especially from apple mac users.

As usual, I am only going to offer the download (2mb) of this (for now) via my PBdiscovery newsletter.

You can find the sign-up form via a tag on the right margin or just send a blank mail to “PBdiscovery” without the quotes to the no surprises aweber.com

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