regren

A minimalistic, cross-platform tool for batch renaming files with regular expressions.

Examples

Windows:

regren sandbox 123(.+)321(\.?.*) "$$file_$1$2" -i

Bash:

regren sandbox "123(.+)321(\\.?.*)" "\$\$file_\$1\$2" -i

Suppose the executable is called from a directory with the following content:

.
└── sandbox
    ├── 1233321
    ├── 123abc321.a
    └── abc123cba321.a

The command above will yield the following changes to ./sandbox/:

Before	After
1233321	$file_3
123abc321.a	$file_abc.a
abc123cba321.a	abc$file_cba.a

In order to ignore partial matches like "abc123cba321.a", use ^ and $.

Run regren --help for more information on the options available.

Implementation

The application is written in C++ 17, using only the standard library and Microsoft's implementation of C++ GSL.
Therefore, the regular expressions are processed using an instance of std::regex constructed with the std::regex::ECMAScript flag turned on. This means that the regex syntax has certain subtle differences from the one actually used in ECMAScript. See "Modified ECMAScript regular expression grammar" for more information.