Rename by internal info?

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Rename by internal info?

Postby Greg152 » Sat Jul 21, 2007 1:30 am

Hi,

I have thousands of little text files, articles, news snippets, etc I've collected over the years.

Plain text, First line of the file is a title or short desctription of the article. Is there any way to pull out those first lines en masse and use them to rename the files? Have you ever seen a utility out there that can do this kind of simple first line extraction? (I've looked...)

I use Archivarius for actually finding things. Its a brilliant program, anyone with this type of need should check it out. However, it really would be a lot nicer to actually have the files named properly...


Thanks,
Greg
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Postby Admin » Sat Jul 21, 2007 7:29 am

BRU doesn't support this, but I have made a similar (but opposite!) modification for another user. Their mod required me to update the first line of the next file with the filename once it was renamed. So I guess this is the opposite, but equally achievable.

It's not something that wold have global appeal though, so I could only do it as a one-off build, and not include the logic in the general release. I'd also be looking for some recompense for doing it.

Let me know if you're interested.


Jim
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Postby Greg152 » Sat Jul 21, 2007 2:14 pm

Hi Jim,

I noticed that BRU supported a text file list rename option, so I got the idea in my head to look for a small utility that would extract lines from multiple files and spit them out to a list and use that list for the renaming.

As it's strictly a personal obsessive complusive thing on my part, I'd pay a small registration or donation for a premade utility that did it -- but that's an insult to you to recode BRU.

Regards,
Greg
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Postby Jane » Sat Jul 28, 2007 2:27 am

Check your personal message.
Jane
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Postby Admin » Sat Jul 28, 2007 8:02 am

Errm...can you clarify?


Jim
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Postby Jane » Sun Jul 29, 2007 5:14 pm

I have a short program written in Perl that basically does exactly what Greg132 wants. It was used to rename thousands of files which were recovered from a crashed hard drive. The initial filenames when I recovered them were just an incremented number, but the first line had info in it which would give a good descriptive filename. It was generously given to me by Glenn (he has posts on this site).
Since it was not a BRU solution I sent a private message to Greg132 so as not to muddle the thread, but I've had no response.

Jane

P.S. This script is compiled into an EXE file so it will work without having Perl on the computer.
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Postby Admin » Sun Jul 29, 2007 6:21 pm

Great, many thanks for clarifying :-)


Jim
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