About

mvre is a command line utility to systematically rename lots of files. It uses regular expressions to match POSIX paths and backreferences to 'copy over' parts of the file path. For a complete and up-to-date description of the utility's capabilities and information on its usage, please run it with the -h option:

./mvre.py -h

Usage Examples

To change all file extensions from txt to tsv, use one of the following command alternatives:

./mvre.py '(.*)[.]txt' '\1.tsv'
./mvre.py '(.*)[.]txt' '$1.tsv'

The \1 or $1 is a backreference to the first match group. To do the same thing using git mv instead of mv, pass the --git option to mvre:

./mvre.py --git '(.*)[.]txt' '\1.tsv'
./mvre.py --git '(.*)[.]txt' '$1.tsv'

You can also do this across several directories by matching and back-referencing the directory names:

./mvre.py '(.*)/(.*)[.]txt' '\1/\2.tsv'
./mvre.py '(.*)/(.*)[.]txt' '$1/$2.tsv'

There are, of course, many more use cases than these few. Use the -h option to get more information about how to use mvre.

Platform Compatibility

mvre is compatible with all POSIX filesystems. This includes all distributions of Linux and Mac OS X. mvre is mainly developed for, and has been tested on, Ubuntu.

Please note that this utility will NEVER be compatible with MS Windows, since Windows' path separator (the backslash) conflicts with the regex escape character.

Name

The name of this utility, mvre is composed of the Unix command mv for moving or renaming files, and re, which stands for 'regular expressions'.

Bugs

There is currently no bug tracker for mvre. If you believe to have found a bug, please send an email to the developer at

[email protected]

License

mvre is distributed under the BSD License. For the full license text, please see the file LICENSE.