FileMover historic background Articles / FileMover Date: Oct 20, 2025 - 07:45 PM 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. This little utility allows you to mass move and rename files with regular expressions. The software is written in java, therefore you will need a Java Runtime Environment 1.2 or higher. Download it at Sun Microsystems. I will take no liability for any damages you make to you files while using this tool. I have succesfully used it on a couple of thousand files and except some misconcepted regexps I never had any problems. This tool is still work in progress... so bear with me that the source code is not available, but at least this software is freely distributable. Send it to your friends if you like it... send it to your granny if you don?t. In the future there will be some nice updates. I'm working on a plugin mechanism which allows you to define your own tasks and call these during renaming process. This will not only include the usual upper/lowercase, capitalize functions but also with some nifty mp3 tagging routines. I did my very best to I8N the tool, there should be a german and an english UI. It should use you current locale... contact your preferred doctor on VM settings for locales if you want to change language. 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 v0.6.2. This article comes from Esomaniacs Homepage http://www.esomaniac.de/ The URL for this story is: http://www.esomaniac.de/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=5