Mass file renaming help

Bastille has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Greetings, this is my first time messing around with perl so I'm rather in the dark regarding how to proceed with this.

I have around 100k image files that I want to change the naming structure for. They all follow the structure of "some amount of words 1 - 001.jpg" to "some amount of words 100 - 001.jpg" and I want to make it so the first set of numbers are all padded to three digits long like the second set.

The files are all within sub-folders of one main folder and my OS is Windows 7. Thanks in advance for anything willing to shed some light on how to go about this task.

Comment on Mass file renaming help

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Re: Mass file renaming help by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Aug 01, 2010 at 21:27 UTC
Wrapped for posting. Remove the say and qq[] once you're sure it would do the right thing: `perl -E"$o=$_ and s[^(.+)(\d+)( - \d+\.jpg)][$1.sprintf('%03d',$2).$3]e and say qq[rename $o $_] for map{ glob $_ .'\.jpg'} grep{ -d } glob $ARGV[0]" \theDir\` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Mass file renaming help by Utilitarian (Vicar) on Aug 01, 2010 at 21:27 UTC
use File::Find to get an array of the file names. Then you can use a regex to separate the file names into their constituent parts. eg `my($words,$fix_num,$remainder)= $filename=~ /(.*?)(\s\d+)(\s-\s\d{3}\.jpg)/;` sprintf will then allow you to specify the padding on $fix_num Then rename the files with rename Have a go at doing this and come back with your code if you have any problems ;) `print "Good ",qw(night morning afternoon evening)[(localtime)[2]/6]," fellow monks."`	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Mass file renaming help by repellent (Priest) on Aug 02, 2010 at 00:43 UTC
Download rename as `rename.pl`. On the command line, type: `perl rename.pl -n "s{(\d+)(?= - \d+\.jpg$)}{ sprintf q(%03d), $1 }e" * +.jpg` [download] Remove `-n` switch to actually do the renaming. Note: Command provided is quoted for `cmd.exe`. Update: Added more details.	[reply] [d/l] [select]