mved 0.6.1

Bulk-rename, copy and delete files using a text editor

• Verifies validity of changes before anything is applied.

• No restrictions for encoding in filenames. ASCII control characters and invalid UTF-8 are escaped.

• Deletions can be reverted until the menu is closed.

• Fully interactive mode allows reverting any changes until menu is closed.

• In case an error occurs (e.g. insufficient permissions) any changes can be reverted.

Installing

• From PyPI: run pip install mved (view on pypi.org)

• From Arch User Repository (AUR): package mved (view in AUR)

Basic Usage

Pass files to rename to mved:

mved *.txt

An editor ($VISUAL or $EDITOR) is started with a list of files:

1 one.txt
2 two.txt

Every filename is listed with a number separated by a single space.

• To rename or move a file, change its path after the number.

• To copy a file, duplicate the line including the number and change the path. The original can be preserved or moved as well.

• To delete a file, delete the line including the number.

• Lines starting with # are ignored, so adding # before the number would also delete it.

After saving the file and closing the editor, if the changes are valid, the modifications are applied immediately. If there were no deletions, mved exits.

If there were deletions, the menu is shown:

[revert/dryrun/stats/quit] >

No files were deleted yet, only moved to a temporary location.

• revert immediately reverts all files to their original locations.

• dryrun prints what revert would do without touching files.

• quit closes the menu and finally deletes any files that were removed with the editor. Pressing CTRL-D is equivalent to quit.

Menu

The menu is skipped in most cases. To enter the menu after every command, pass -i/--interactive to mved.

Available commands are listed in the prompt. Which commands are available depends on the current state.

Some commands have an upper-case variant. If any character in the entered command is upper-case, these commands provide a slightly different function.

Commands

• apply: Apply the changes made with the editor. This is usually done automatically unless -i/--interactive was specified.

  • If upper-case: If all changes were successful, apply deletions immediately and close the program.

• dryrun: Print the changes apply would make without applying any changes.

• edit: Start the editor again with the current file list.

  For entries to be moved or deleted, the original line is added as a comment. These comments are ignored by the parser.

  • If upper-case: do not include the comments for changed entries.

  • The editor to run can be specified after the command. See Editor below. For example, the file list can be opened with vi by entering:

    edit vi

    If the command is preceded by | (pipe) then the command is run as a stream editor. See Stream Editor below. For example, to replace every occurrence of one with two, enter:

    edit |sed s/one/two/

    If the command is omitted, the it is taken from the -e/--editor option, $VISUAL, or $EDITOR, (the first one that is set) or vi.

• reset: Run the editor with the original file list. If no changes are made, the previous changes are restored.

  • If upper-case: Immediately remove all changes of the file list, without running the editor.

  • If lower-case: The editor program can be specified like with edit.

• diff: Print a list of differences made to the file list.

  • If upper-case: Show file numbers in the diff.

• add: See file exists conflict below.

• conflicts: Print the list of conflicts again.

  • If upper-case: Use a different format that includes file numbers and doesn’t abbreviate long lists.

• revert: Revert the changes of the last apply command. Files marked for deletion are moved back to their source location.

  • If used after an error during apply, the partial changes so far made by apply are reverted.

  • If an error occurs during revert, the next revert will restore files to the locations before the failed revert command. This indicates other programs are making changes concurrently to mved. Use external programs to resolve these conflicts and make sure no other programs make concurrent changes.

• quit: Exit the program. If changes have been applied successfully and there were deletions, files marked for deletion are irrevocably deleted.

  • If used after an error during apply, additional confirmation is required to quit without reverting.

  • Unless used after an error during apply, pressing CTRL-D is equivalent to quit.

Commands don’t need to be typed out in full: when the prefix of a command is entered, the first command matching that prefix is executed.

For example, given the prompt [diff/apply/dryrun/edit/reset/stats/quit] >, to run the given commands the following input could be entered:

• lower-case diff:

  diff
  d

• lower-case dryrun:

  dryrun
  dry
  dr

• upper-case edit:

  EDIT
  Edit
  eDit
  edI
  E

Conflicts

After editing the file list, conflicts may be detected and the changes cannot be applied. In that case, the conflicts are listed and the menu is shown:

[conflicts/diff/edit/reset/stats/quit] >

No changes have been applied yet. Enter edit to resolve conflicts by editing the file list. See Menu for further usage.

The following kinds of conflicts may be detected:

• destination conflict

  Two files in the list have the same destination filename.

  Enter edit to resolve the conflicts in the editor.

• file exists

  A destination file already exists that was not passed to mved. Enter add to add the destination files to the list and edit to resolve the conflicts by moving the added files.

• path exists

  Part of a destination path already exists and is not a directory.

• invalid filename

  A filename on the list is invalid.

  Enter edit to change invalid filenames in the editor.

• cannot copy/delete directory

  Copying and deleting whole directories is not supported.

• directory conflict

  A modified directory path is part of the source or destination of other files. Such changes currently are not supported. Try making the changes with separate invocations of mved.

Escapes

ASCII control characters and invalid UTF-8 are converted to an escaped representation in the file list.

Escape sequences are initiated with the \ (backslash) character. Anything else is left unmodified. Literal backslashes in filenames must be doubled.

The replaced control characters are:

• 0-31 (0 to 0x1f inclusive)

• 127 (0x7f)

The following table lists available escape sequences. The Escape column lists the escape sequence understood by mved. All other columns are for reference only.

Escape	Abbr.	Caret Notation	Hex	Dec	Description
\a	BEL	^G	07	7	Bell
\b	BS	^H	08	8	Backspace
\t	TAB	^I	09	9	Horizontal Tabulation (Tab)
\n	LF	^J	0a	10	Line Feed
\v	VT	^K	0b	11	Vertical Tabulation
\f	FF	^L	0c	12	Form Feed
\r	CR	^M	0d	13	Carriage Return
\\			5c	92	Backslash
\x00 .. \xff			00 .. ff	0 .. 255	Arbitrary octet

Any byte value can be specified with \x followed by two hexadecimal digits representing its value, ranging from \x00 to \xff.

Note that \x escape sequences specify literal octets and are not encoded to UTF-8. Values above \x7f will result in invalid UTF-8 unless constructed in a conforming manner. To specify code points above U+007F, enter literal UTF-8 in the editor.

Note that even though \x00 can be specified, it is not allowed in filenames.

Advanced Options

Interactive Mode

Passing -i/--interactive to mved starts interactive mode. In this mode, the menu is shown after every action. After editing, changes can be inspected with diff or dryrun, edited with edit or reset or accepted with apply. After apply, all changes can be undone with revert, even if there were no deletions.

Recursion Depth

The -l/--levels, -d, and -r options control the recursion depth for directories passed to mved.

• -l/--levels sets the recursion depth to the given number.

  The default is 1. This means for files passed to mved that are directories, the contained files are added.

• -r recurses infinitely. All files in the hierarchy are listed.

• -d disables recursion. This can be used to rename given directories.

Editor

The -e/--editor option specifies the interactive editor command. It is also used when entering the edit and reset menu commands without argument. The default is taken from the environment:

• $VISUAL is used, if it is set.

• Otherwise, $EDITOR is used, if it is set.

• If both are unset, vi is used.

The command is run with /bin/sh. The file to edit is added as the last argument.

Stream Editor

The -E/--stream-editor option or entering edit |<command> in the menu runs the given command as a stream editor. The command receives the file list on its stdin and must print the result to stdout. The format is the same as with the interactive editor. The command is run with /bin/sh.

For example, to replace all occurrences of one with two, run:

mved -E 'sed s/one/two' *.txt

This is only applied on startup, in place of the initial interactive editor call.

To do the same in the menu, enter

edit |sed s/one/two