Sort and rename files using a 9 digit sequence number

Question

I want to rename multiple jpg files in a directory so they have 9 digit sequence number. I also want the files to be sorted by date from oldest to newest. I came up with this:

ls -tr | nl -v 100000000 | while read n f; do mv "$f" "$n.jpg"; done

this renames the files as I want them but the sequence numbers do not follow the date. I have also tried doing

ls -tr | cat -n .....

but that does not allow me to sepecify the starting sequence number. Any suggestions what's wrong with my syntax? Any other ways of achieving my goal? Thanks

Answer 1

DIR="/tmp/images"
FILELIST=$(ls -tr ${DIR})
n=1
for file in ${FILELIST}; do
    printf -v digit "%09d" $n
    mv "$DIR/${file}" "$DIR/${digit}.jpg"
    n=$[n + 1]
done

Something like this? Then you can use n to sepecify the starting sequence number. However, if you have spaces in your file names this would not work.

Answer 2

If any of your filename contains a whitespace, you can use the following:

i=100000000
find -type f -printf '%T@ %p\0'  | \
sort -zk1nr | \
sed -z 's/^[^ ]* //' | \
xargs -0 -I % echo % | \
while read f; do 
   mv "$f" "$(printf "%09d" $i).jpg"
   let i++
done

Note that this doesn't use ls for parsing, but uses the null byte as field separator in the different commands, respectively set as \\0 , -z , -0 .

The find command prints the file time together with the name. Then the file are sort ed and sed removes the timestamp. xargs is giving the filenames to the mv command through read .

Answer 3

If using external tool is acceptable, you can use rnm :

rnm -ns '/i/.jpg' -si 100000000 -s/mt *.jpg

-ns : Name string (new name).
/i/ : Index (A name string rule).
-si : Option that sets starting index.
-s/mt : Sort according to modification time.

If you want an arbitrary increment value:

rnm -ns '/i/.jpg' -si 100000000 -inc 45 -s/mt *.jpg

-inc : Specify an increment value.