vils-ng

vils-ng is a mass renaming script that allows you to rename files with all the comfort of your favorite editor. It is a small bash rewrite of the original vils tool. The desciption for the original script is 'edit an ls' which I find quite fitting.

I mostly did this rewrite since I'm not a zsh user. I also added a few features I was missing in the original script, like:

• recursive (for listing and moving)
• dry-run
• control over hidden-files
• confirmation before moving
• ...

History

The original vils was written by Oliver Fromme in 2002. It uses zsh and is an enormous timesaver. You can find the original code of the vils script here.

Update: Sadly Olivers original page is not up anymore. So instead I will link to freshports, there you can find a copy and some information about the original script: https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/vils/.

Usage

vils-ng will simply use the editor configured via the environment-variable $EDITOR to let you edit a file-listing and will rename the files accordingly after you close the editor.

Options and usage examples can be found in the help-message:

simon@cpad ~ > vils-ng -h
vils-ng [options] [file1] [file2] [file3] [...]

Mass-renaming with your favorite editor!

Options:
 -h    help
 -r    recursive
 -v    verbose
 -d    dry-run (only print what would be done, do not actually move files)
 -D    debug
 -x    use x11 editor

Examples:

 # rename files in current dir:
 > vils-ng

 # rename specific files:
 > vils-ng testfile1.txt testfile2.mkv testdir/testfile3.log

 # rename files in current dir and all subdirs:
 > vils-ng -r

simon@cpad ~ >

If started with the '-x' option, the GUI-editor from the $VISUAL environment- variable will be used.

If not configured the normal editor will fallback to /usr/bin/vi, while VISUAL will fallback to /usr/bin/gvim.

Moving to different directories is supported. If the target directory is not existing, it will be created.

A combination of -r (recursive) and directly targeting directories as command-line arguments is not supported at the moment.

Switching out the names of 2 lines will not work reliably. It depends on the order if the operation will be successful and it is therefore not recommended to do this. Please be careful, it is your data (-:

Authors

Simon Schiele (simon.codingmonkey@gmail.com)