Commands using mv

Just a quick hack to give reasonable filenames to TrueType and OpenType fonts.

I'd accumulated a big bunch of bizarrely and inconsistently named font files in my ~/.fonts directory. I wanted to copy some, but not all, of them over to my new machine, but I had no idea what many of them were. This script renames .ttf files based on the name embedded inside the font. It will also work for .otf files, but make sure you change the mv part so it gives them the proper extension.

REQUIREMENTS: Bash (for extended pattern globbing), showttf (Debian has it in the fontforge-extras package), GNU grep (for context), and rev (because it's hilarious).

BUGS: Well, like I said, this is a quick hack. It grew piece by piece on the command line. I only needed to do this once and spent hardly any time on it, so it's a bit goofy. For example, I find 'rev | cut -f1 | rev' pleasantly amusing --- it seems so clearly wrong, and yet it works to print the last argument. I think flexibility in expressiveness like this is part of the beauty of Unix shell scripting. One-off tasks can be be written quickly, built-up as a person is "thinking aloud" at the command line. That's why Unix is such a huge boost to productivity: it allows each person to think their own way instead of enforcing some "right way".

On a tangent: One of the things I wish commandlinefu would show is the command line HISTORY of the person as they developed the script. I think it's that conversation between programmer and computer, as the pipeline is built piece-by-piece, that is the more valuable lesson than any canned script.

Need to have rc iso pre-downloaded before running command.

Some commands (such as sed and perl) have options to support in-place editing of files, but many commands do not. This shell function enables any command to change files in place. See the sample output for many examples.

The function uses plain sh syntax and works with any POSIX shell or derivative, including zsh and bash.

This got a bit complicated, because I had to introduce an additional dot at the end that has to be removed again later.

Find every file and move it to current directory.

You WILL have problems if the files have the same name.

Use cases: consolidate music library and unify photos (especially if your camera separates images by dates).

After running the command and verifying if there was no name issues, you can use

to remove now empty subdirectories.

I constantly need to work on my local computer, thus I need a way to download the codeigniter user guide, this is the wget way I figured.

Renames duplicates from MusicBrainz Picard, so you get the latest copy and not a bunch of duplicates.

I realize there's a few of these out there, but none exactly in this form, which seems the cleanest to me

Change run control links from start "S" to stop "K" (kill) for whatever run levels in curly braces for a service called "myservice". NEWFN variable is for the new filename stored in the in-line shell. Use different list of run levels (rc*.d, rc{1,3,5}.d, etc.) and/or swap S with K in the command to change function of run control links.

This command will replace spaces in filename with underscore, for all file in directory that contain spaces.

mkdir some file and mv some file

For this example, all files in the current directory that end in '.xml.skippy' will have the '.skippy' removed from their names.

Useful for backing up old files, custom logs, etc. via a cronjob.

This command changes all filename and directories within a directory tree to unaccented ones. I had to do this to 'sanitize' some samba-exported trees. The reason it works might seem a little difficult to see at first - it first reverses-sort by pathname length, then it renames only the basename of the path. This way it'll always go in the right order to rename everything.

Some notes:

1. You'll have to have the 'unaccent' command. On Ubuntu, just aptitude install unaccent.

2. In this case, the encoding of the tree was UTF-8 - but you might be using another one, just adjust the command to your encoding.

3. The program might spit a few harmless errors saying the files are the same - not to fear.

Using a GUI file managers you can merge directories (cut and paste). This command roughly does the same (it doesn't ask for confirmation (no problem for me) and it doesn't clean up the empty SRC directories (no problem, trivial).

probably does the same:

Very helpful when you've got complex filenames and needs to change just some small parts of it.

Renaming a file called "i-made-a-small-typo-right-here" to "i-made-a-big-typo-right-here":

You could also copy multiple files, edit, remove, process, etc.

Renames all the jpg files as their timestamps with ".jpg" extension.