Abstract This package provides a command line utility called aka for swiftly renaming (or copying) files using Python code. This makes it easy to rename files even when the changes you are making are quite complicated. It always renames files in two passes to avoid collisions; it tries to detect miscellaneous errors in advance; and if errors occur underways it will put you in an emergency mode to resolve the problem or roll back changes. It also provides the functions aka.rename and aka.copy , which is the underlying interface.

The problem being solved Lets say you have a directory with the files File0 , File1 , and File2 . Then some people comes along and complains (rightly or wrongly) that the numbering starts at zero. So you decide to write a program to rename all those files, but a problem arises. You cannot do it in any order you like, you have to start with File2 -> File3 in order to avoid conflicts. It’d be nice to just write a function that knows how to change the names of individual files and let another program sort out the rest. This is what aka.rename is about: >>> import aka >>> from contex import rules >>> def machine ( fn ): return rules(r'File(\d+)', {1: lambda digit: int(digit) + 1}).apply(fn) >>> machine ( 'File42' ) 'File43' >>> aka . rename ( machine ) Actions to be taken (simplified; doesn't show the temporary stage): /home/uglemat/Documents/File0 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File1 /home/uglemat/Documents/File1 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File2 /home/uglemat/Documents/File2 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File3 Target directories: /home/uglemat/Documents The files will be renamed as shown above (in two passes though, in order to avoid collisions). This program searched for name conflicts in all target directories and did not find any. If errors do pop up, you'll be taken to an emergency mode where you can roll back changes. Continue? [N/y]: y Renaming /home/uglemat/Documents/File0 -> /tmp/aka_maok91r8/File0 Renaming /home/uglemat/Documents/File1 -> /tmp/aka_maok91r8/File1 Renaming /home/uglemat/Documents/File2 -> /tmp/aka_maok91r8/File2 Renaming /tmp/aka_maok91r8/File0 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File1 Renaming /tmp/aka_maok91r8/File1 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File2 Renaming /tmp/aka_maok91r8/File2 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File3 True I used contex.rules to manipulate the string, but you can do whatever you like inside machine , you just need to return the new name of the file. By default it renames files in the current working directory, but that can be changed with the location argument to aka.rename . aka.copy is basically the same, it just copies files instead. Read the docstrings of those functions to learn the details.

Command line utility That’s all fine and dandy, but when you just have some files and you need to rename them, you want to do it with a command line utility. This is the basics: $ aka --help Useful information ... $ aka -p 'fn+".jpg"' That will add a “.jpg” suffix to all files in the working directory. But lets do what we did above with aka.rename : $ aka -p 'rules(r"File(\d+)", {1: lambda digit: int(digit) + 1})' The expression after -p doesn’t need to be a new filename, it can also be a unary callable (like machine above) that returns the new filename. That is why the example above works; contex.rules returns a callable. If you want to copy instead of rename, just add in the -c option: $ aka -c -p 'rules(r"File(\d+)", {1: lambda digit: int(digit) + 1})' -- COPYING FILES IN . -- ERROR: /home/uglemat/Documents/File1 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File2 is a conflict! ERROR: /home/uglemat/Documents/File2 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File3 is a conflict! Aborting... Err, yes, that won’t work, of course. Good thing aka detects naming conflicts in advance!

More complicated renaming schemes That’s great, but what if it’s not a simple one-liner? Then you need to create a new file, write some python code, launch the python interpreter, import the stuff you need… It’s cumbersome, which is why aka can help with that: $ aka -e emacs This will launch emacs and take you to a temporary file which looks kind of like this: import re from os.path import join from contex import rules # Directories in which to perform changes: # /home/uglemat/Documents def rename ( fn , dirname ): return fn Your job is to complete rename , and when you exit the editor it will do the job (after asking you if you want to continue). Lets do something more advanced, say you have lots of files in ~/Documents/files of the format File<num> and you want to split them into the folders odd and even , like this: ~/Documents/files $ for i in { 0 ..20 } ; do touch "File $i " ; done ~/Documents/files $ ls File0 File1 File10 File11 File12 File13 File14 File15 File16 File17 File18 File19 File2 File20 File3 File4 File5 File6 File7 File8 File9 ~/Documents/files $ mkdir odd even There is a slight problem in that you can’t rename odd and even , but they are in the same directory. You just got to make sure that the rename function returns a falsy value for those filenames (btw, aka treats directories like files and will rename them too). Lets go to the editor with aka -e 'emacs -nw' and write this: import re from os.path import join from contex import rules # Directories in which to perform changes: # /home/uglemat/Documents/files def rename ( fn , dirname ): match = re . search ( r '\d+' , fn ) if match : digit = int ( match . group ( 0 )) return join ( 'even' if even ( digit ) else 'odd' , fn ) def even ( d ): return ( d % 2 ) == 0 The directories odd and even doesn’t match, so rename returns None for those names and thus they are ignored, and the code above works as expected: ~/Documents/files $ aka -e 'emacs -nw' running $ emacs -nw +9:14 /tmp/aka_3uvuyn8c.py Aka: Proceed? [Y/n]: y -- RENAMING FILES IN . -- Actions to be taken (simplified; doesn't show the temporary stage): /home/uglemat/Documents/files/File3 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/files/odd/File3 /home/uglemat/Documents/files/File18 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/files/even/File18 /home/uglemat/Documents/files/File13 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/files/odd/File13 ... Target directories: /home/uglemat/Documents/files/odd /home/uglemat/Documents/files/even The files will be renamed as shown above (in two passes though, in order to avoid collisions). This program searched for name conflicts in all target directories and did not find any. If errors do pop up, you'll be taken to an emergency mode where you can roll back changes. Continue? [N/y]: y Renaming /home/uglemat/Documents/files/File3 -> /tmp/aka_st72r5jp/File3 Renaming /home/uglemat/Documents/files/File18 -> /tmp/aka_st72r5jp/File18 Renaming /home/uglemat/Documents/files/File13 -> /tmp/aka_st72r5jp/File13 ... Renaming /tmp/aka_st72r5jp/File3 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/files/odd/File3 Renaming /tmp/aka_st72r5jp/File18 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/files/even/File18 Renaming /tmp/aka_st72r5jp/File13 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/files/odd/File13 ~/Documents/files $ ls * even: File0 File10 File12 File14 File16 File18 File2 File20 File4 File6 File8 odd: File1 File11 File13 File15 File17 File19 File3 File5 File7 File9

Rollbacks To test the rollback feature of aka , lets first launch this command: $ aka -p 'rules(r"File(\d+)", {1: lambda digit: int(digit) + 1})' -- RENAMING FILES IN . -- Actions to be taken (simplified; doesn't show the temporary stage): /home/uglemat/Documents/File3 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File4 /home/uglemat/Documents/File1 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File2 /home/uglemat/Documents/File2 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File3 Target directories: /home/uglemat/Documents The files will be renamed as shown above (in two passes though, in order to avoid collisions). This program searched for name conflicts in all target directories and did not find any. If errors do pop up, you'll be taken to an emergency mode where you can roll back changes. Continue? [N/y]: Now it’s waiting for confirmation from the user. So we have time to do some sabotage in another shell: $ touch File4 $ ls File1 File2 File3 File4 In the first shell, lets enter y to see how it fails: Renaming /home/uglemat/Documents/File3 -> /tmp/aka_1ozr4w4b/File3 Renaming /home/uglemat/Documents/File1 -> /tmp/aka_1ozr4w4b/File1 Renaming /home/uglemat/Documents/File2 -> /tmp/aka_1ozr4w4b/File2 Renaming /tmp/aka_1ozr4w4b/File3 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File4 EMERGENCY MODE: File /home/uglemat/Documents/File4 already exists! ERROR: Error happened when trying to rename /tmp/aka_1ozr4w4b/File3 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File4 What should the program do? retry : try again (presumably you've fixed something in the meantime) rollback : attempt to undo changes (except for the ones previously continue'd) showroll : show which actions will be taken if you choose `rollback` exit : exit the program continue : ignore the error and move on > Oh my, looks like things didn’t go as planned. You’re now in the emergency prompt of aka . You can easily fix the problem by deleting File4 and entering retry , but that’s boring. Let’s first see what happens when you select continue : > continue Renaming /tmp/aka_1ozr4w4b/File1 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File2 Renaming /tmp/aka_1ozr4w4b/File2 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File3 LOST FILES IN TEMP DIR: '/tmp/aka_1ozr4w4b' $ ls /tmp/aka_1ozr4w4b File3 It’s not very nice that it just left the file in the temp dir. continue is probably rarely a good option. Lets be more sophisticated and choose rollback : > showroll Rollback actions: /tmp/aka_1ozr4w4b/File2 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File2 /tmp/aka_1ozr4w4b/File1 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File1 /tmp/aka_1ozr4w4b/File3 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File3 What should the program do? retry : try again (presumably you've fixed something in the meantime) rollback : attempt to undo changes (except for the ones previously continue'd) showroll : show which actions will be taken if you choose `rollback` exit : exit the program continue : ignore the error and move on > rollback Rollback renaming /tmp/aka_1ozr4w4b/File2 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File2 Rollback renaming /tmp/aka_1ozr4w4b/File1 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File1 Rollback renaming /tmp/aka_1ozr4w4b/File3 -> /home/uglemat/Documents/File3 $ ls File1 File2 File3 File4 Rollback will “undo” all previous actions, in the reverse order that they were “done’d”. If you use the --copy option then the undoing consists of deleting files already copied. If any of the rollback actions fails, then aka will ignore it and try to undo as much as possible.

Installing aka works only in Python 3. Install with $ pip3 install aka . You might want to replace pip3 with pip , depending on how your system is configured.

Windows Compatability I developed this program on GNU/Linux, but it should be working on Windows as well. It understands that filenames are case insensitive on Windows when checking for naming conflicts, yet the case sensitivity is preserved when the actual renames are done.

Developing Aka has some tests. Run $ nosetests or $ python3 setup.py test to run the tests. The code is hosted at https://notabug.org/Uglemat/aka You can install in development mode with $ python3 setup.py develop , then your changes to aka will take effect immediately. Launch the same command with the --uninstall option to (kind of) remove.