Nevermore.us

Well, today my boss “forgot” how to batch rename files in dos. He had a bunch of numbered jpg images like 001.jpg and 002.jpg and needed them renamed to 301.jpg and 302.jpg etc etc. He is an “engineer” from romania and i quote “When I used to do it, it was much simpler, such as C:\copy *.jpg 100+*.jpg or similar.” Now I’ve been using DOS since 6.22 and to my knowledge copy has NEVER worked like that. Of course i cant just call my boss out so i linked him to some yahoo answers page about how to do it. Being an “engineer” i figured he could READ the page and figure out how to modify the script to suit his needs. He then emails me back and says “Please use the info below and tell me what I need to enter”. LOL. Great. Why cant you just fucking use TotalCommander or some other Windows Commander style application that has a built in rename function?? Or download one of the 100′s of shareware/freeware renamer programs. You DO have antivirus right? Or did you not keep it updated like i told you to? /rant

So anyway, i did it, here it is:

@echo off
SETLOCAL EnableDelayedExpansion
for /f "tokens=1-2 delims=." %%i in ('dir /b *.jpg') do (
SET /A var=%%i+300
copy %%i.%%j !var!.%%j
)

All the script does is a for loop in which it runs a “dir” command and takes the filename (%%i) and adds 300 since the files are numeric and /A means use arithmetic. Then it issues a copy command to make a new copy of the file now with the new number.

Couple things i had forgot about writing dos bat files:

1. While in Cmd all your variables work with a single % but when running the .bat file you have to use 2 ie: %%i otherwise they wont work
2. if you SET a variable and need to call it later %var% doesnt work! you must use !var!

And btw, wtf Microsoft. Why is there no fucking batch rename tool built into windows? Dont you think that might be a handy feature for anyone that has a digital camera? Thats nice you can shout at your Kinect and it will play a youtube or netflix video, but some of us need to do work with computer still and having the OS actually have these types of features that should have been implemented a decade ago might be handy.

Ever asked yourself “How do i stop Windows from highlighting a newly installed program?”. I have often wondered this same thing as i really find the “Feature” to be more annoying than its worth. It is really quite easy to resolve by doing these simple steps:

1. Right click on your start button and choose “Properties” from the submenu.
2. Change to the “Start Menu” tab at the top of the Properties window

3. Click the “Customize” button
4. Scroll through the list of options until you find “Highlight newly installed programs” and uncheck the box

5. Click ok

And you’re done. Now Windows will no longer highlight newly installed programs in your start menu.

Late
G-fiz

Hi there,

Im not usually one to hype MS products but im rather impressed with windows 7 so far and now they’ve come out with a free anti-virus. Well free assuming you have a genuine copy of windows installed. So no pirate versions Anyway if you dont have antivirus software or the one you have is old and out of date, several versions behind, or just a bulky piece of garbage such as Norton, then you should grab this.

Download it here

Late
g-fiz