Linux Format forums

[2tux-zx7r]

After months of nagging from my missus I have gotten round to sorting out the near thousand digital pictures we have been storing on our hard disk

I've written a little script so that once I've collected related pictures with nifty and memorable titles like p100101.jpg into a temporary folder I can batch rename them to something that makes sense. I'm no programming guru and getting the following to work took me about two hours today !

So it worked on a load of test pictures and I was made up. But the second test failed with the error message:

mv: cannot stat `*': No such file or directory

Here's my bash script:

#! /bin/bash
# script to rename a collection of photos in a single dir

echo "What is the working directory? (include the final backslash)"
read workdir

echo "What is the base filename?"
read basefile

echo "What is the number of the last picture?"
read filecount

cd $workdir
for file in *
do
let filecount=filecount+1
mv $file "$basefile$filecount.jpg"
done

Someone please tell me what I've done wrong

John

[nordle]

for file in *; do


Also, you can add
set -x
at the start of your script to enable debugging, makes it easy to see eactly what the problem is...most of the time
_________________
I think, therefore I compile

[TheDoctor]

[nordle]

oh ok, I thought it was fussy about having the semi colon, guess not.

But yeah, a dir test would help:

if [ ! -d $workdir ]; then
echo "$workdir does not exist"
exit 1
fi
cd $workdir
_________________
I think, therefore I compile

[nelz]

It is fussy about the semi-colon, but only if the two commands (for and do) are on the same line.

Replace

[nordle]

If you know the files are always going to be jpg, then
for file in *.jpg; do
should be ok too.
_________________
I think, therefore I compile

[nelz]

Not if there are no .jpg files in the current directory.
_________________
Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who it's friends are.

[TheDoctor]