Using Bulk Rename Utility to Rename Files

It isn’t often that I have to rename a ton of files. Usually I find that it is just faster to rename the three or four (or ten) files that need renaming than it is to figure out how I can do it by writing a batch file – it just isn’t worth taking the time to dig up all the arcane commands that I’ve managed to forget over the years and make it happen. But then there are the times when I have dozens upon dozens of files. Or hundreds. In fact, just the other day I needed to rename upwards of 450 files. Doing those one at a time was daunting, to say the least, and maybe it was going to be worth figuring out the batch file after all. Then it happens that Windows doesn’t do regular expressions very well, and it looked like I would be renaming them all by hand.

Then I found Bulk Rename Utility. This relatively small (less than 1MB) download comes feature-packed with just about everything you might need to rename a whole bunch of files. In fact, it will probably come with more than you need. It certainly could do everything that I needed and then some.

Over the last three-plus years, I had collected a number of invoices from my Movable Type Consulting business. Unfortunately, when I created them, I had a bad habit of not keeping to a standard. So some of the invoices had a date, some had a name, some had a number, some had all three (or a combination of the other two). What I wanted to do was to try and standardize them. That’s when I pulled out Bulk Rename Utility. First, you can enter your regular expression to match. So I would enter the files with a date. Then I can tell it what to replace with, and before anything happens, I can see right there in the window if it’s going to work as I want it. If not, I simply tweak the regular expression (and the replacement pattern) and see if that works.

In the end, I had to do a couple of files by hand – but doing these files by hand, and letting BRU do the vast majority of them – was a welcome tradeoff.

There are also features such as revert (fix an update that you screwed up, which I had to use at least once), folder rename, append parent folder name, column sort, logging, date stamps, directory recursion, the changing of attributes and many, many more. Though I really don’t have the need for such power, I can really respect the fact that it’s there, and I’ll definitely be keeping this filed away in case I manage to get things hosed up again. If you ever need this sort of functionality, it’s definitely a tool you’ll want to have available.