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diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..65053b9 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,68 @@ +# mmv — multi move + +`mmv` is a command-line utility to move multiple files in a more convenient +manner than for-loops. The best way to explain this is with an example. Say +you had the following files in the current directory: + +```sh +$ ls +'The Fellowship of the Ring.mp4' 'The Two Towers.mp4' +'The Return of the King.mp4' +``` + +You may be excited because you’re about to watch Lord of the Rings, but the +filenames have spaces in them which for various reasons is [not a very good +idea][1]. You’re hacker though, so you execute the following code in your +shell: + +```console +$ for old in *; do +> new=`echo "$old" | tr ' ' '-'` +> mv "$old" "$new" +> done +``` + +Cool, that worked. It is quite a lot to write directly into your shell though, +and if the shell you’re using has a CLI that isn’t great with multi-line input +you may find yourself with a negative experience. + +But wait! Now you decided that actually you would like your filenames to all be +in lowercase too, because it’s more consistent with the rest of your filesystem. +Well cool, now you can use your shells history to navigate to the previous loop, +navigate to the call to `tr`, and edit its parameters to `'A-Z' 'a-z'`. But +again, if you have a shell that doesn’t take too kindly to this longer form of +script editing then you won’t have a great time (and trust me, _very few_ shells +offer a nice experience in this regard). + +Let’s try to accomplish this same task using `mmv`: + +```console +$ mmv * +``` + +After running the above command, an instance of your editor specified by the +`$EDITOR` variable gets launched with a list of all your files. It looks like +so: + +``` +The Fellowship of the Ring.mp4 +The Return of the King.mp4 +The Two Towers.mp4 +``` + +Now like mentioned previously, you are a hacker. This means that you use vim +(or if you’re a _real_ hacker, emacs). You’re not that cool though, so you use +vim. Well thankfully vim makes renaming these files very easy: + +```viml +VGu " Go into visual-line mode, select the whole document, and lowercase + " everything +:%s/ /-/g " Swap all spaces for hyphens +ZZ " Save and quit +``` + +…and just like that, we have turned all those pesky spaces into hyphens and +lowercased our filenames, and all it took was 15 keypresses (that includes the +enter key, and saving the file)! + +[1]: https://superuser.com/q/29111 |