xren - the Extended Rename project

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Abstract

Synopsis: xren is a file renaming utility for complex rename operations affecting multiple files up to whole directory trees. Runs on Unixes and Windows and maybe also elsewhere. Works by applying arbitrary regular expressions on filenames. Requires Perl.
Propaganda: xren is incredibly powerful in what complex renaming tasks it can fulfill. It leaves its competitors far behind, above all those that call themselves powerful. ;-) However, beginners may find it not quite easy to use.
Status: The project is in Beta stage. The current release is version 0.1.1. No known bugs.
Environment: Command line. Maybe there'll be a GUI version in the far future. Maybe not.
Programming Language: Perl
License: Artistic License (in short: Open source, therefore free)

Introduction

So you decided to make use of SSI on your website from now on and have to rename all your thousand *.html files to *.shtml? Or you have downloaded all those nastily named mp3s and now have to rename them one by one from something like "Name_of_stupid_1337_ripper-Name of artist-07-Song title.mp3" to "Name of artist-07-Song title.mp3" or so? And you are going to do this using your Windows Explorer or type the mv command for each and every file? — Don't!

xren is made for you! xren takes a search pattern and a rename pattern and renames all matching files accordingly. Well, how does xren help you with the two tasks from above? Just type
xren "*.html" "*.shtml"
or
xren "Name_of_stupid_1337_ripper-*.mp3" "*.mp3"
respectively. That's all. xren finds all files in question, even in all subdirectories, if you like, and renames them.

xren works from the command line

Attention Windows users! xren is a command line program, not one of those Click&Wonder-what thingies. So be prepared to launch your command prompt and recall the cd and dir commands.

xren requires Perl

This is another issue primarily addressing Windows users. xren is a Perl program, so you need a Perl interpreter to run it. While this is no problem on ordinary unix boxes since Perl is usually available with the base packages there, you may still not have installed Perl on your Windows box. So go and get your brand new Perl right now, for instance the widely used ActivePerl distribution.

Download

Release	Release Notes	Unix	DOS/Windows
xren-0.1.1	Notes/Changes	xren-0.1.1.tar.gz	xren-0.1.1.zip

Source code

The source code is essentially the file xren.pl, which is contained in each download package. You may, however, want to browse the CVS repository or download the nightly CVS tree tarball.

Progress

2002-02-20	Released version 0.1.1 which fixes a bug in 0.1.0.
2002-02-14	Uploaded new source and released this as version 0.1.0. Advanced to Beta stage. Further features are planned - compare the TODO list.
2001-09-06	Uploaded a first somewhat working but yet rather untested version. Find the source at http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/xren/xren/. Now claiming the project being in Alpha stage. ;-)

Thanks, Credits

Some of the background pictures used for this site are shamelessly taken from somewhere out of my /usr/share/ directory. They seem to belong to the KDE or Gnome project.

Special thanks to SourceForge.net for hosting this and thousands of other open source projects for free.

xren - Extended Rename