Re: Optimize file renaming.

[trammell]

Nobody has mentioned the rename(1) script (installed into /usr/bin/rename on my Debian machine, part of the perl package) written in Perl. IIRC it's been around since Perl 4 days....

% touch 1.png 11.png 1111.png
% rename 's/(\d+)/sprintf("%03d",$1)/e' *.png
% ls *.png
001.png  011.png  1111.png
%

[Fletch]

And if you don't have it and don't feel like grabbing the entire source tarball:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# rename - Larry's filename fixer
$op = shift or die "Usage: rename expr [files]\n";
chomp(@ARGV = <STDIN>) unless @ARGV;
for (@ARGV) {
    $was = $_;
    eval $op;
    die $@ if $@;
    rename($was,$_) unless $was eq $_;
}

Always handy. Don't leave $HOME without it.

[blazar]

On the system I'm currently on:

$ file $(which rename)
/usr/bin/rename: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SY
+SV), for GNU/Linux 2.0.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stri
+pped

However from the description you give of perl's rename it seems it lets you run arbitrary code. I hope it uses Safe; although I heard some experienced and knowledgeable perl hacker say that even that isn't really bulletproof...