OT: File name replacer from text list?

Jessariah67 wrote on 1/14/2005, 3:21 PM
Before you point me to the dozens of excellent file renamers out there, what I'm looking for is a bit different, and I can't find it (nor do I know if it exists)...

I have a client who has given me a hard drive of AVIs and a text "list" of all the AVIs' "names." There's a cut sheet that references the names. This (and other reasons) makes it a "have-to" to change the names of the AVI files "Project-Tape01 - clip001" to "John and Susan in Chip Room 01"

Does anyone know of a utility that allows you to outright change the file names in a directory to those in a list in text form? You take a directory with 120 files in it and a text file with 120 lines and "paste" it in?

Comments

Liam_Vegas wrote on 1/14/2005, 3:41 PM
I would recommend that you create a DOS .BAT file that will contain the individual file rename commands in them. It will take <some> manual keying but overall I think it will be relatively easy for your to create and verify that it will work on the whole list.

Using notepad create a file called "myrename.bat" in directory containing the AVI files with the following structure.

ren "Project-Tape01 - clip001" "John and Susan in Chip Room 01"
ren "Project-Tape02 - clip009" "Slartybartfast in Fjords 02"
etc etc

Depending on how that "cut sheet" is structured (and presuming you have access to the file electronically) this may either be easy or difficult to do. You can likely create the .BAT file from this by saving the file into a TEXT format (from Excel or Word - depending on how the file is created").

Your run this file by "launching" it (double click it). Or you can bring up the command prompt and type "myrename.bat" <enter>)

You can either manually type the existing file names into the file... or you can create a dump of the file names to a text file in a directory by typing the following command into a DOS command prompt.

dir /b >myfiles.txt
Redio wrote on 1/14/2005, 3:46 PM
If I understand you right you can do it with ACD See.

If you mark all the files you will rename to "John and Susan in Chip Room 01"
You only have to write "John and Susan in Chip Room ##" and a sec. later the are renamed to
"John and Susan in Chip Room 01"
"John and Susan in Chip Room 02"
etc.

Hope it was an answer to your question you cab use.

Rune
MarkWWW wrote on 1/15/2005, 4:31 AM
You can do this with Alex Fauland's free filename replacer "A.F.5 Rename your files" which you can download from http://www.fauland.com/af5.htm

You'll need to make sure that the list of avi files shown in the filelist in the replacer are displayed in the correct order to match the order of the new names in the text list you have (there are up and down buttons to allow you to re-order them if necessary). Then you just choose the option to import the list of new names and tell it to do the rename.

Mark
Jessariah67 wrote on 1/15/2005, 2:49 PM
Mark,

That is EXACTLY what I was looking for. Great utility! Thanks for the tip!

Kevin
rmack350 wrote on 1/15/2005, 11:33 PM
Liam, you're a gem. I knew how to get a list of file names but had always thought the batch file would be more complex. This looks pretty simple.

Not that i was the one who asked but thanks!

Rob Mack