normfn
(normfn used to be known as normalize-filename; it's been renamed
for simplicity).
normfn is a utility designed to rename files and directories to
follow a normalized pattern including a leading date. This is a modified version
of Mark Hurst's file naming strategy from the book Bit
Literacy, but based on the international standard,
ISO-8601. It also makes other modifications to filenames, listed below.
normfn has an opinionated sense of what a filename should look
like. It prefers YYYY-MM-DD-rest-of-the-filename.ext, where Y, M, and
D are the year, month and day that filename corresponds to respectively. At
the moment, you cannot change this pattern, although there is a long-term goal
to make the pattern configurable.
This default pattern is the ISO-8601 pattern, which is superior. In particular, it's useful because it sorts naturally when listing files, browsing them with a file manager, etc.
In general, run with the default options, normfn will try to
locate anything that it thinks looks like a date in the filename, using some
built-in heuristics, and reformat the filename to follow the pattern above. If
it doesn't find a date, it will add one, using one of the dates/times it finds
in the filesystem that correspond to the file. On Linux and OS X (the only
supported platforms right now), there are three: the ctime, the mtime, and the
time now - i.e. the time when you run normfn. Using the
--earliest option - the default - will pick whichever of these times is
earliest (oldest).
normfn will also:
- Lowercase filename extensions (I'm not aware of any good reasons for uppercase ones, and they look ugly).
Installation
normfn requires at least Python 3.8.
More Information on How to Use normfn
- Run
normfn --help.
Logging and Other Information
For safety, by default, normfn keeps a log file in
~/.local/state/normfn-undo.log.sh of all the actions it takes, in
shell format to make it easier to undo them. See the comment at the head of that
file (once normfn has generated it) for more information. You can
configure this with the --undo-log-file and --no-undo-log-file options.
For more information on all the options available, run normfn --help. You can
alter or disable most normfn behaviour using these options.
Project hosted on github.