Ytdyklly

I have a directory which contains numbered image files, something like this:

01.png

02.png

03.png

03.svg

04.png

05.png

06.jpg

07.png

08.png

09.png

09.svg

10.png

Sometimes there may be multiple versions of a file in different formats (eg. a png and svg version of the 03 and 09 files above) but the numbers are otherwise consecutive. Typically there are 40-80 such files in each directory. The numbers correspond to the order these images appear in a manuscript (a Word document, but that's not important). There is no other way to determine the order of the images.

If I add a new image to the manuscript I need to place a copy of the image in this directory with the correct numbering. So if the new image is the fifth in the manuscript I need to rename the files in the directory to this in order to make room for it:

01.png

02.png

03.png

03.svg

04.png

06.png

07.jpg

08.png

09.png

10.png

10.svg

11.png

What is the most straightforward way from the command line, or from a script or macro to renumber all the files starting at a certain number? I have a standard Fedora Linux install using bash.

I think that it should do the work:

#!/bin/bash



NEWFILE=$1



for file in `ls|sort -g -r`

do

    filename=$(basename "$file")

    extension=${filename##*.}

    filename=${filename%.*}



    if [ $filename -ge $NEWFILE ]

    then

        mv "$file" "$(($filename + 1))".$extension

    fi

done

Script takes one parameter - number of you new image.

PS. Put script in another directory than your images. In images directory there should be only images named in this way that you described.

This would be easier in zsh, where you can use

• the On glob qualifier to sort matches in decreasing order (and n to use numerical order, in case the file names don't all have leading zeroes to the same width);


• the (l:WIDTH::FILLER:) parameter expansion flag to pad all numbers to the same width (the width of the larger number).

break=$1   # the position at which you want to insert a file

setopt extended_glob

width=

for x in [0-9]*(nOn); do

  n=${x%%[^0-9]*}

  if ((n < break)); then break; fi

  ((++n))

  [[ -n $width ]] || width=${#n}

  mv $x ${(l:$width::0:)n}${x##${x%%[^0-9]*}}

done

In bash, here's a script that assumes files are padded to a fixed width (otherwise, the script won't rename the right files) and pads to a fixed width (which must be specified).

break=$1      # the position at which you want to insert a file

width=9999    # the number of digits to pad numbers to

files=([0-9]*)

for ((i=#((${#files}-1)); i>=0; --i)); do

  n=${x%%[^0-9]*}

  x=${files[$i]}

  if ((n < break)); then continue; fi

  n=$((n + 1 + width + 1)); n=${n#1}

  mv -- "${files[$i]}" "$n${x##${x%%[^0-9]*}}"

done

This exact issue is covered in this article. Note that you would have to modify it to support the SVG and PNG formats, by adding a second MV step.

Easier:

touch file`ls file* | wc -l`.ext

You'll get:

$ ls file*

file0.ext  file1.ext  file2.ext  file3.ext  file4.ext  file5.ext  file6.ext

There doesn't seem to be much recent interest in this question but, should someone stumble upon it, there are three issues here. One is how to select files to rename based on semantic criteria (range is not lexical and cannot be specified by wildcards or even regular expressions-- automata theory says that this is more complex than an NFA). The second is how to change a name by modifying a portion of it. The third is how to avoid name collision. A script in Bash and many other languages can do this specific transform but most of us would rather not have to write a program every time we want to rename a bunch of files. With my (free and open source) rene.py you can do what you want but it takes two invocations to avoid the name collision problem. First rene ?.*/#7-80 %?.* B increments all names in the range, adding a prefix of % to avoid existing names. Then rene %* * removes this prefix from those files that have it. I describe this at https://sourceforge.net/p/rene-file-renamer/discussion/examples/thread/f0fe8aa63c/