Name Mangler - A batch file renaming utility

Jun 09, '08 05:52:00AM

Contributed by: robg

The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]

There are lots of utilities out there to help with batch file renaming, including Apple's own Automator, which includes some renaming actions. One of my favorite tools is Name Mangler, which has a (relatively) intuitive interface, and some powerful renaming features. Using a drop-down menu, you tell Name Mangler what you'd like it to do -- find and replace, number sequentially, change case, set extension, add prefix/suffix, or remove/insert characters. There's one more option here, Advanced, that I'll discuss in a bit more detail later.

The left half of the Name Mangler window shows the list of files that you'll be modifying. You can populate the list by drag-and-drop from the Finder, or by clicking a button to add the current Finder (or Path Finder) selection to the list. Next to each file is an example of how it will look when renamed, based on your chosen conditions. Those conditions are shown on the right half of the window, and are based (obviously) on which type of renaming you've chosen from the drop-down menu. The pre-defined change types will meet most of your needs, but for those times when you want to do more, the Advanced option offers a tremendous amount of power. Using Advanced, you can construct your own replacement rules, using Name Mangler's name conversion description language (NCDL). With NCDL, you can create your own rules with constants, variables, and functions. There's an Examples pop-up menu you can use with Advanced to see some sample queries, and the help file has more info on using NCDL. It's quite powerful, though building advanced NCDL tasks isn't for the faint of heart.

Once you've created a set of renaming rules, you can save them as a "droplet," which is basically a file that launches Name Mangler, activates your settings, acts on the files you've dragged to the droplet, then quits Name Mangler. (The behavior differs if you launch a droplet when Name Mangler is already running; check the help file for more details.)

I don't need to batch rename files all that often, but when I do, I find that Name Mangler works well for my needs.

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