Multi-level renaming

[NolaineCrusher]

I'm reorganizing my audiobook library after switching to a new library management approach, and its going very slowly because I'm having to do the renaming in a series of replacements that I would love to be able to do in one fewer operations, if possible. If I were working on a faster machine, this wouldn't be such a problem, but I'm working on a remote server and file operations are very slow.

I'm renaming directories with multiple levels of subdirectories, working from the bottom up.

Some directories have a string inside square brackets with I need to get rid of, including the brackets and the whitespace in front of it. I use [

Right now my approach is:

(lowest level subdirectories)
Currently looks like:

Code: Select all

#. Text To Keep - Year {Information to Get Rid Of}

What I want it to look like

Code: Select all

##. Text to Keep (Year)

Sort by name to get all the lines of subdirectories that begin with an integer together, select all the ones have an integer < 10, and execute the following operations on all of them at once.

• Use RegEx(1)

  Code: Select all

  \{.*\}

  to get rid of the curly brackets, the text inside the curly brackets, and the leading whitespace before the curly brackets
• Replace(2)

  Code: Select all

  -

  with

  Code: Select all

  (

• Add(7) Prefix 0 to pad the leading integer
• Add(7) Suffix

  Code: Select all

  )

Then go through and select all the subdirectories without a leading integer, or with an integer >= 10, and do the same operation, but without padding the leading integer.

Then I deal with the upper level subdirectories, which only have a string in square brackets (with leading whitespace) at the end, which I get rid of using

Code: Select all

[*]

.

This is pretty much the limit of what I can do with my limited knowledge of regex. I'm wondering if there is some way to streamline it a bit more, using masks or something, but I'm not sure how?

My bottom-level subdirectory has some extra material I want to get rid of, but I don't know if it's possible to delete files using a rename operation. I know you can move them to a different location, but not sure about deleting? (I have considered moving them to a temporary directory and discarding them.) But I'd basically need to locate them by their file extension (or sort the list by file type) to do that. So that's another operation I have to do (actually five different operations, as there are five different file types I have to delete, and each time it takes upwards of 10 minutes to locate, select, and delete 200-400 very small simple text files.

Thank you for any help you can provide.