When Loading Rename Pairs from a File Allow Path Names

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When Loading Rename Pairs from a File Allow Path Names

Postby Dustydog » Sun Sep 18, 2016 11:01 am

Allow a full path on the left side of the bar. This would allow renames from wherever they happened to be (potentially quite powerful), and one wouldn't have to worry about finding the original directory again after preparing the set.

You could either allow renaming the paths or not.

But if you did allow renaming the paths, and allowed renaming on the RIGHT side of the bar as well, this would be an extremely powerful, arbitrary move-on-rename feature.

(Sometimes I'll work up a set of renaming pairs in a document using a combination of regular expressions and a little hand editing. When I'm done, I'll not infrequently have to find where the original files were again. If I could simply save the full paths and not just the file/folder name, BRU would in a sense find them for me.)

Also, I think one possible workflow that would be handy is to keep spitting new file sets that need renaming into a text file, then using various editing tools and macros, later just run it through BRU in batches.
Dustydog
 
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Re: When Loading Rename Pairs from a File Allow Path Names

Postby JMM » Thu Jan 19, 2017 10:59 pm

One thumbs up to this suggestion.

I had a program I was developing for doing a lot of consecutive renames, because sometimes I like to just edit the filenames on Notepad++ or a spreadsheet and then transform the result into a batch file for the renaming. My program would work for renaming on the following conditions:
* The left side has path and file names.
* If the right side has no path, then the file is renamed.
* If the right side is only a path, then the file is moved (but not renamed).
* If the right side has both path and file names, then the file is both moved and renamed.

For moving files, it would create any path that didn't exist, but wouldn't rename paths as it would be ambiguous whether you wanted to move the original file to a new path, or rename the path. For a 'future features' I would allow only paths at the left side, thus enabling a pure, unambiguous path rename feature, and include an option to process path renames before or after file renames (since new path names might refer or not to the new path structure). Also, it would never overwrite anything, or merge 2 paths when a path renames to one already existing. That kind of stuff.

I stopped programming while this wasn't even reaching the renaming stage, so not even a working prototype was built. But this simple set of rules for the Rename Pairs in BRU would greatly improve the already good potential of such a feature.
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