RakuRename

A file-rename tool inspired by Perl's File::Rename.

Installation

If you have zef, there are a number of options:

• just run zef install RakuRename;
• or clone this repo and issue zef install <path-to-cloned-repo>;
• as yet another variation, after cloning it, cd into the repo and zef install . (note the dot at the end).

Additionally, since all there is here, really, is the executable bin/rrnm, you can just download that and use it.

Usage

The distribution only provides the rrnm binary. In general:

• Run rrnm --help to see information on the possible command-line switches / options.

• The first positional argument should be a substitution or transliteration operator, as documented under Raku's substitution-operators doc section.

• The positional arguments following that should be the files you want to move / copy / whatever (see the examples below).

• The regex syntax is whatever Raku will recognize.

Examples

Some usage examples follow, all of which are to be run in a terminal where you have access to zef-installed binaries.

rrnm 's/^a/b/' <DIRECTORY>/a*

will rename every file / directory of the form <DIRECTORY>/a<BLAH> to <DIRECTORY>/b<BLAH>.

On the other hand,

rrnm -c='cp' 's/^a/b/' <DIRECTORY>/a*

will take every file of the form <DIRECTORY>/a<BLAH> and copy it to <DIRECTORY>/b<BLAH>. It will complain about not being able to copy directories among those (because the cp command behaves this way), but you can fix that with

rrnm -c='cp -r' 's/^a/b/' <DIRECTORY>/a*

You can even do the following in a git repo, to effect a regex-based git-mv:

rrnm -c='git mv' 's/^(\d)/0$0/' [0-9]* 

or equivalently, using lookahead assertions,

rrnm -c='git mv' 's/^<?before \d>/0/' [0-9]*

That will perform a git mv on every file whose name starts with a digit, prepending a 0 (if you wanted to do this for some reason).

The --dry option just shows you the command that would be run. So in a git repo that contains files 1.txt and 2.txt (and nothing else starting with a digit),

rrnm -c='git mv' 's/^(\d)/0$0/' [0-9]* --dry

would simply show you

git mv 1.txt ./01.txt
git mv 2.txt ./02.txt

in the terminal.

I use this all the time: first run what you think will work with --dry, then recall the last command and remove the --dry option.