DOS question

[David Crow]

Russell' wrote:

any expert on the 'old' DOS?

Looks to be some good stuff here.

"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson

"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons

"Man who follows car will be exhausted." - Confucius

[puromtec1]

Its home page is classic. It has the old style page counter, mentions Windows 3.1 and has a picture of a floppy disk on it.

[Snowman58]

Flash Renamer - http://www.rlvision.com/downloads.asp[^]

Melting Away www.deals-house.com www.innovative--concepts.com

[Lost User]

Kind of old school, but for tasks like this, I'll fire up my spreadsheet program of choice and build individual statements using simple formulas and cell formatting. Once you have a column of commands, you can copy them and paste them into the command prompt and they'll run one at a time. Not as cool as PowerShell or some of the other better answers, but it gets the job done.

Joe Enos joe@jtenos.com

[Larry G Grimes]

Joe has the best answer on this one.

[Mike Winiberg]

Hmm, multiple tools available really, depending on budget and the amount of effort you want to use: ZTREE (remember Xtree for DOS), ZTree is based on this, is still being developed and sold, and has none of the memory limits of the old DOS Xtree, seing as how its a Windows 32bit console app. Otherwise look at XXCOPY if you want something that runs in a window, DirectoryOpus or Powerdesk for native windows GUI. If you want 'free', then Powershell would be a good start, or one of the many 'Norton Commander' clones out there.

[dchuks]

Use the following script. It does the following: For each *.txt file in the current directory... 1. remove the first character, assuming it is an L 2. add 00 to the front 3. extracts the last 7 characters XXX.txt, where XXX is the original number padded with zeros 4. adds the L back to the front 5. does the rename

@echo off
setlocal ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION
for /f "delims=" %%a in ('dir /b *.txt') do (
(set i=%%a)
(set i=00!i:~1,100!)
(set i=L!i:~-7!)
echo rename "%%a" to "!i!"
rename "%%a" "!i!"
)
endlocal

[Naruki 0]

At least, I think that's what it does, so surely they named it that. Same initials, anyway. Total Commander is da bomb, baby. Select the files (or folders) to rename, press CTRL-M for the rename dialog, and bask in the options. Also note the preview before committing changes.

Narf.

[Naruki 0]

No he doesn't. leppie does. :-)

Narf.

[thinicezero]

I like that!

[Marc Greiner at home]

You could try Renamer[^] (free product). For example, I use it to rename my camcorder videos with a filename that equals the video timestamp (YYY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS.MTS)

[Victor Ulloa]

Mike is right, for jobs like these I can't live without ZTree. You can insert, delete portions of the name, insert an autoincrement (with or without the leading zeroes), etc.

[Simon Capewell]

I use either Stexbar[^] or Shell Renamer[^]

[Gary Wheeler]

for /I %I in (1,1,9) do ren L%I.txt L00%I.txt
for /I %I in (10,1,99) do ren L%I.txt L0%I.txt

Software Zen: delete this;

[MatthewPainter]

Up till a couple of months ago I would have written this in VBScript no sweat but these days I am writing everything in PowerShell to get my skills up. Thanks for the challenge.

# Make 100 test files (create dir structure first)
1..100 | % ($_){New-Item "c:\scripts\Lfiles\L$_.txt" -type file}

# Rename all files to specification (remove -whatif switch to make it live)
Get-ChildItem c:\scripts\Lfiles | % ($_){rename-item -path $_.fullname -newname (($_.basename -replace "[0-9]", "")+("{0:000}" -f [int]($_.basename -replace "[^0-9]", ""))+($_.extension)) -whatif}

[brimars]

Assuming Russell is actually using DOS (we still have machinery running DOS exclusively on 386 and 486 machines), I think Henry's idea is probably the best place to start. The DOS ? and * wildcard characters don't always give exactly the expected results.

[TheF0rmatter]

For files with numbers less than 10: FOR /L %F in (1,1,9) DO REN L%F.txt L00%F.txt For files with numbers from 10 to 99: FOR /L %F IN (10,1,99) DO REN L%F.txt L0%F.txt You could expand this out with a check to make sure the file exists: FOR /L %F IN (1,1,9 DO IF EXIST L%F.txt REN L%F.txt L00%F.txt

[Lost User]

Aww, you hurt my feelings. I was just starting to feel special. :) Just kidding - that Total Commander thing does look pretty nice.

[InfinitelyRemote]

Whenever I have to do bulk renaming I always include DOS in the mix... First I place all the files in c:\work folder entering the following in DOS C: CD C:\WORK DIR /B > FILES.TXT yields a simple text file with all file names listed one per line. then make a second copy of the TXT file COPY FILES.TXT FILES1.TXT FILES.TXT becomes the rename "Command" portion and FILES1.TXT becomes the "New Names" portion of the exercise. Many times the file names I am converting contain spaces so that means the RENAME command requires the name be encased in quotes. so using a text editor (I use JSoft's EditPadPro) I do a search and replace of carriage returns... FIND [CR] and REPLACE WITH: " RENAME " This puts a quote at the end of each line and the rename command-space-quote at the beginning of each line (with manual tweaking of the first and last lines). Save FILES.TXT Open FILES1.TXT in the text editor and with some thoughtful and creative "String Search and Replace" convert this list into the required filenames. Using the Block Mode Selection feature, copy this column of file names. Open FILES.TXT and paste this block into the far right field of the first row (making sure the block does not crash into the existing text.) Save FILES.TXT I then open FILES.TXT in CuteHTML because it has a "Code Optimizer" feature that allows me to remove all extra spaces from the file. Save the FILES.TXT as FILES.BAT Back in DOS run FILES and WOOSH!... easy-peasy. The whole process usually goes pretty quickly and is the best way I have found to deal with insanely punctuated filenames. I know this is nowhere near as elegant as you where hoping for but that is what I would be doing. change L to L00, change L001 to L1 to get the hundreds and manually fix L1.txt to L001.txt and on like that. more power to you!

[Russell]

that was what I was looking for! thank you -------------------------------------------------------------------- If someone in future will have the same problem I also report here a more complex script I prepared before reading this reply that does the same thing (I hope :~). Because for me it is trivial to not change absolutely the name of the files, then the script is very robust on this feature (and it display a sort of report to check all the progress) Thanks again to all

@echo off

@echo File 001 to 009
set /a cnt1=1
:DATA0109
IF NOT EXIST L%cnt1%.sg2 @echo L%cnt1%.sg2 not found
IF EXIST L%cnt1%.sg2 @echo rename L%cnt1%.sg2 L00%cnt1%.sg2
IF EXIST L%cnt1%.sg2 rename L%cnt1%.sg2 L00%cnt1%.sg2
set /a cnt1+=1
if %cnt1%==10 goto :DATA1099BEGIN
goto :DATA0109

:DATA1099BEGIN
@echo File 010 to 099
set /a cnt1=0
set /a cnt2=1
:DATA1099
IF NOT EXIST L%cnt2%%cnt1%.sg2 @echo L%cnt2%%cnt1%.sg2 not found
IF EXIST L%cnt2%%cnt1%.sg2 @echo rename L%cnt2%%cnt1%.sg2 L0%cnt2%%cnt1%.sg2
IF EXIST L%cnt2%%cnt1%.sg2 rename L%cnt2%%cnt1%.sg2 L0%cnt2%%cnt1%.sg2
set /a cnt1+=1
if %cnt1%==10 set /a cnt2+=1
if %cnt1%==10 set /a cnt1=0
if %cnt2%==10 goto :EXIT
goto :DATA1099

:EXIT
pause
goto :EOF

---

Russell