During a long night of programming I had the need for a tool that could rename a lot of files at once. Luckily I was sitting in front of a Linux Box and found the command line tool mmv.
I’m sorry I don’t know the name of the author. But I know that this tool inspired me to write my own tool when I encountered this mass renaming probem on a Microsoft machine.

I decided to write a platform independent tool with java that allows the user to mass rename sets of files. Files are found using regular expression. The new name is built up using back references to the RegExp.

There had been some evolution meanwhile and I build a parser using ANTLR. With this parser it is possible to apply functions to the new name. I implemented a small set of functions like lower/uppercase. But you will find all information on the site of the current version which is v0.6.1 .

TODO

• Extract the finding and renaming part as a library
• Change the UI so that it is utilizing the newly created library
• Write some user documentation
• Write some API docs
• Let the API become stable and release this stuff with source.
• Make a command line app which utilizes the newly created library
• Write some Unit Tests
• Wait for the folks reporting bugs and fix them
• Make table cols sortable
• Make file finding optional as dir finding is optional
• Implement these functions:
  • crop("left" | "right" | "both" | "length", cropsize, string)
  • trim("left" | "right" | "both", string)
  • capitalize(string)
  • changecase(string)
  • reverse(string)
  • number(numberformat, startnumber, incrementsize)
  • date(dateformat)
  • random()
  • system(command, commandoptions)
  • MP3 Write Access
  • Graphic format information extraction (e.g. author, camera, date)

The old version is v0.5.0

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