pipe-rename takes a list of files as input, opens your $EDITOR of choice, then
renames those files accordingly.
cargo install pipe-rename
This will install the renamer binary.
Usage is simple, just pipe a list of files into renamer. This will open your
$EDITOR (or vim, if not set or passed with --editor) -- or %EDITOR% (or Notepad
on Windows, if not set or passed with --editor), and once your editor exits it
will detect which files were renamed:
ls | renamerYou can also supply filenames as positional arguments. To rename .txt files
in the current directory:
renamer *.txtThe default behavior is to rename files, but you can override this. If you want
to run git mv old new on each rename, you can do something like this:
ls | renamer --rename-command "git mv"Takes a list of files and renames/moves them by piping them through an external editor
USAGE:
renamer [OPTIONS] [FILES]...
ARGS:
<FILES>...
OPTIONS:
-c, --rename-command <COMMAND>
Optionally set a custom rename command, like 'git mv'
-e, --editor <EDITOR>
Optionally set an editor, overriding EDITOR environment variable and default
-f, --force
Overwrite existing files
-h, --help
Print help information
-n, --filenames-only
Only rename filenames
-p, --pretty-diff
Prettify diffs
-u, --undo
Undo the previous renaming operation
-V, --version
Print version information
-y, --yes
Answer all prompts with yes
NB: it makes sense to be aware of the issues ls can cause in this
context, depending on the ls flavor (or substitute, such as lsd, exa
...) used. Please read this document
for more information.
While your shell will pass the file names individually, no matter if they
contain whitespace, an ls that fails to detect the pipe and print one file
name per line will cause issues. Unfortunately ls -Q also isn't a solution
here, because unlike the shell -- which will strip quotes prior to passing
them to invoked commands -- renamer won't handle the quoted names and will
probably complain about non-existent files, too.
If you have tools like GNU find at your disposal, you can also use the
following method:
find -type f -exec renamer {} +This would execute renamer with all of the files matched by find. You can
use additional find predicates such as -name or -ipath to limit which
files to rename. There is, however, one caveat: on large lists of files you
may encounter multiple invocations of renamer -- and thus your editor -- due
to how find ... -exec {} + works. It will pass as many file names on the
command line as it can fit but it is limited by ARG_MAX (see getconf ARG_MAX
output for how long the overall command line length can be on your system).
Other find flavors would allow the following, but it would invoke renamer
-- and thus your editor -- once for every single found file:
find -type f -exec renamer {} \;In order to sidestep this issue, you can employ xargs in conjunction with
find like so (-print is implied for find):
find -type f | xargs renamer --editor vim
The part past xargs is the invocation of renamer without the file names.
It exists just to demonstrate how you would pass arguments to renamer using
this method.
If your files contain wonky characters you could also try:
find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 renamer --editor vim
Alas, this could be asking for trouble. If your file names contain line breaks,
for example, this could confuse renamer which expects a single file name per
line when re-reading the edited file.
renamer will wait for the editor to close, before offering to rename the files according
to your changes. Some editors cause issues with this method, because they spawn child
processes or similar. This is a list of known workarounds for some editors. Feel free to
contribute by sending a pull request or opening an issue and giving the details.
We can work around these issues by explicitly using a method to invoke the desired editor,
which works with the assumptions made by renamer. It can be done by passing --editor
(short -e) or setting the environment $EDITOR (%EDITOR% with cmd.exe or
$env:EDITOR with pwsh.exe).
- Sublime Text can be used by passing
--editor "subl -w"to have it wait until the files are closed
- VS Code can be used by passing
--editor "code.cmd -"and then giving the other files - VSCodium analogously can be used with
--editor "codium.cmd -"
 Marcus Buffett 🤔 💻 |
 Robin Krahl 🤔 💻 🐛 |
 Max Timkovich 🤔 💻 |
 Benoit de Chezelles 🤔 |
 Oliver Schneider 🤔 💻 |
This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!
