Unix Magic Trick: Rename stuff in bulk

Fri, 14 Jul 2017 12:39:14 +0000

Here’s a magic-trick I rock from time to time. I only graze the basic abilities of the “rename” program, but even in my basic use of it, I find it super helpful.

In this case, I had a situation where my eBooks had been resorted from a massive flat directory in to one containing sub-dirs named with the prefix “Categories - “. I might have sorted them in another manner if I didn’t know about the rename command. When I was done sorting and thus left with my category-based directories, I then wanted to rename each dir to dump the prefix.

Multi-threaded tar/bzip2

Tue, 20 Jan 2015 15:25:03 +0000

I often find myself banging my head against a wall watching tar compress with a single execution thread. PBZIP2 is the solution to that problem.

Here’s my few recipes for using this:

Compress: tar cf archive.tar.bz2 –use-compress-prog=pbzip2 archive/

Uncompress:�pbzip2 -dvc archive.tar.bz2 | tar x

Enjoy!

Unix on

Unix Magic Trick: Rename stuff in bulk

Multi-threaded tar/bzip2