Help Bulk Filename Change

[Lazarus]

Guys,

I have a rather larger number of files that I want to do a name change of.

eg
[xxx1] file1.xxx
[xxx2] file2.xxx
[xxx3] file3.xxx
[xxx4] file4.xxx
etc

I want to bulk change to

file1.xxx
file2.xxx
file3.xxx
file4.xxx

any suggestions?

 

[Rubric]

Subcontract the job to india.

1000 files for 50p

 

[Cadelin]

I take it you are not working in Linux because if you are a small shell script would do this easily?

 

[Lazarus]

nope - windows xp or dos

 

[Kryten]

Always used to do that with a prog called ACDSee but that was for images. Did normal files too, but there must be a 3rd party app to do it. Windows does it to a degree but only with its own prefixes.

 

[ST^]

I usually use Excel to create a batch file. Paste in the first list of filles, then use a formula or find/replace in the 2nd column to create a list of what they should be renamed to. Then use a formula on the 3rd column to put them together as "move XXXX XXX", paste the whole lot into a .bat file and away we go!

But that's just me

 

[MYstIC G]

Google "RenamerFairy"

 

[TdC]

I read that as reamer-fairy, but that's just cause I was expecting something dodgy from the G

 

[dysfunction]

I know in Windows XP if you can just highlight all the files you want to rename press F2 and change the name of the one that is "edited" all the others will be changed to the same name...

 

[Insane]

Google "RenamerFairy"

+1 on that application

its a god-send when needing to do mass-renames, used it many times when reorganising music and tv shows.

 

[SheepCow]

I have a regular expression based renaming tool called 'rren' which you can use:
http://www.benedictoneill.com/content/fh/rren.7z

It requires .NET 2 to be installed iirc, usage is:

Usage: rren [-s] [-i] [-d] match rename

  -s         Include subdirectories.
  -i         Case insensitive regular expression.
  -d         Use full path (including directory) in the regular
             expression match.
  match      The regular expression to match files with.
  rename     The expression to rename files to, using $1, $2
             etc. to specify matches from the regular expression.

.NET regexs aren't quite the same as PCRE ones iirc, been a while since I used it so I advise testing on some copied files first. It's quite a 'shoot yourself in the face' tool, i.e. you can rename all your files on top of each other

Use at own risk