Linux renaming examples, when filenames have spaces

Do your filenames have spaces? Do you curse bash for making it difficult to loop over them?

Fear not! (and wash that potty mouth out with soap). This loop is all you need:

find . -type f -name "*.mp3" -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do ls "$file"; done

# Rename "foo.mp3.mp3" to "foo.mp3"

find . -type f -name "*.mp3" -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do file=`basename "$file"`; newfile=$(perl -le'$ARGV[0]=~s/\.mp3//;print$ARGV[0]' "$file"); echo mv "$file" "$newfile"; done


# Add a leading zero to numbered filenames

find . -type f -name "064*" -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do file=`basename "$file"`; echo mv "$file" "0$file"; done

# The above commands will print out what they're about to do. Check it is what you expect! Then make this change to run them for real:

Change: echo mv foo bar
To: `mv foo bar`

# ^ Those ` are backticks

# Note the order of files is not sorted

(source)

Good enough software

There's so much software available these days, it's difficult to find which is the best without laboriously downloading, installing, configuring and testing, which I don't often have time for. Unfortunately a large proportion of software is simply not good enough, or its features are poorly described.

Here is some "good enough" software I've found for Windows:

• To diff directories, e.g. sync music or photos: FreeFileSync 6.3
• To diff the content of files, e.g. source code: WinMerge
• Windows Explorer alternative: xplorer 2
• To encode mp3s: LAME
• To see where your disk space is being used: Treesize
• To remove spyware: Spybot: Search & Destroy
• Torrents: qBittorrent
• N64 emulator: project64
• Programmer's text editor: Notepad++
• ebook management: Calibre
• Manage iPhone music outside iTunes: Media Monkey
• Graphics maniplation: GIMP
• Rename files: Bulk Rename Utility
• Macro recorder: Autohotkey
• Media player: VLC, or MPC-HC (not tried)
• Music player: Winamp
• Documents and spreadsheets: Microsoft Office
• (LibreOffice and OpenOffice are NOT good enough)

Rename multiple files in bash

for i in *.JPG; do mv "$i" "${i/.JPG}".jpg; done

or

for i in *.jpg; do mv "$i" "`basename $i .jpg`.JPG"; done