PFrank - Easy Regex-Based File Renaming
Monday, March 9, 2009 at 07:19PM in tools Anyone who spends 8 hours a day on a computer pushing around assets for a big game has at one point or another needed a way to rename bunches of files at once. I've been looking for a good tool to deal with mass-renaming for some time, and they all generally fall into two categories:
- Namby-pamby tools that can't do much but change a file extension or add a number to the end.
- Command line tools that, while powerful, are obtuse and dangerous.
Recently I came across a nice free tool that sits (for me) in the ideal middleground: PFrank.
PFrank is quite powerful, utilizing regex for it's main renaming functionality, though it supports standard windows wildcard matching as well (E.g. *.jpg to select all jpgs). Where it really shines though is in the peace of mind it offers for large operations. It lets you preview your renames on a bit of sample text while editing, giving you a chance to get the expression just right. As well, before the rename is run, it will preview the entire operation, showing the before and after of all affected files. Finally, you can save an undo file, letting you easily revert a rename operation.
There are a load of other features as well that may or may not be useful to you: You can save rename operations for later, for example to run them periodically, or to share with coworkers. You can write custom renaming plugins in Python to handle complex cases. It will read metadata out of images and audio files, allowing you to rename files based on this information.
So I'm sure that all my programming buddies are going to point me to some tool in cygwin that can do everything this can and more. But this is a tool for those of us that don't live on the command line and still need advanced renaming functionality.
Reader Comments (3)
I only use command lines when I'm a) using software I shouldn't be because I'm a student with no money who's making no money off what I make or b) when we're working on a game over Subversion. Otherwise I steer clear. I remember when I was like 8 I would watch my dad sit around poring over a book on DOS for months trying to do... like, very little constructive activity. Give me a tool and let me script in it.
Oh and since I don't Twitter, I need to comment on your latest couple Tweets. You don't see conversation on design blogs because they're not built for conversation. It seems like we're only capable of posting long essays or mind-numbingly short Tweets. We haven't figured out, semantically, how to condense Internet writing into discretely consumed, dialectic units. So you write a design essay, I have the time and attention span to comment meaningfully on one part of it, and then maybe write a reply essay that again you read part of and comment a tiny bit on.
Nobody's ever persuaded. You counter-argue, they say "interesting points, but" and then they repeat the argument you already critiqued. "Interesting" is already over-used in real world speech, but it's the AIDS of Internet-speak.
Yes, I agree. It's a tricky thing. In the past I've had wonderful conversations on various forums -- they really allow the short form and long form to exist side by side. The problem with forums is twofold though:
* They don't feature conversations, they feature threads. With a blog, you can land on the front page and see what the author is talking about. With forums, you are always a half-dozen clicks from seeing anything interesting.
* They don't have good exploratory features. Blogs have things like tags and the reblogging community aspect, Twitter has followees. Forums are just a heap of posts.
I think your blame on 'interesting' may be a little misplaced though. Basically, if I agree with a blog post, I usually have no compulsion to post a reply. I only comment if I disagree or think of an improvement to the original point. This in itself is fine, but then those comments and improvements are segregated from their original context, and any insights or changes in opinion are left out of the original post (coz who wants to go back and change it?).
And as far as people not being convinced or changed by a post or comment, well, that's just people. :P