re-name huge ammount of files

[greg32]

Hi,
I have a lot of mp3 files (thousands). Some are names as per the songs, and most of them are named just with numbers (i.e. 1,2,3,4,02,03,04...). They are all over the place. I want to copy them into one directory, but because there are lots of 01's, and 1's and 02's... there will be a big head ache with the same files names. Is there a way that I can rename a large ammount of files in one go, and at the same time, tell the rename command to give them the name 1,2,3,4,5,6.... in sequence as it is doing it, so that they all end up in order, and only one file has the one number as it's name, so that I can store them in one directory??? I hope this makes sense.

regards Greg

[bmichaelsen]

You could do this with some bash magic. Or simply use the RenameSeq-Button in the gentoo-Filemanager (is in portage) ....

[David_Escott]

$count=0;
for dir in directory1 directory2 directory3 etc...
do
for f in ~/$dir/*.mp3
do
mv ~/$dir/$f ~/dest/$count.mp3;
count= $(( $count + 1 ));
done
done

I'm sure there are better ways to do this. But that would put you on the basic track. Also searching the forums for rename and mmv will bring up lots of stuff about those two programs.

[TheEternalVortex]

You could do this in perl. It would also be easy to rename based on ID3 tags or anything like that too.
_________________
-- Andy