Doug, you're generally right in what you say, but this suggestion was not
intended to deal with multiple or complex renaming requirements.
It is designed to work with the files as they come out of the Pentax
digitals, and since they are restricted to 8 characters, a one character
substitution will suffice to differentiate files from up to 26 different
cameras (36 if you also use 0-9)!
I think Pentax have been wise to limit their filename structure to the
FAT-16 convention - they could not know if anyone out there is still using
such a system!
I agree that %4 could be omitted, and %2 used in both places: this was why I
gave the warning about file type changes.
John Coyle
Brisbane, Australia
----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Franklin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Pentax-Discuss Mail List" <pdml@pdml.net>
Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2007 10:14 AM
Subject: Re: Camera Raw 3.7 is Here
> John Coyle wrote:
>
> Just a friendly warning. You have to be a bit careful with the rename
> command in DOS/Windows. The lengths of the old and new file names must
> be the same.
>
>> "rename IMG?????.jpg IMGK????.jpg"
>
> Thus the need for five ? characters in the old name and four in the new
> name in this command.
>
>> To be really flexible, write yourself a little batch file containing this
>> one line:
>> rename %1?????.%2 %1%3????.%4
>> Save it: I called mine Prename.bat. To ensure you can use it always,
>> save
>> it to your Windows or WINNT folder.
>
> For this to work, the old file names must all have the same prefix
> ("%1", e.g., "IMG"), they must have five characters following that
> prefix, and they must be unique within the rightmost four characters
> before the filename extension ("%2" or "%4"). Plus, that "%4" should be
> replaced with "%2" or the file names won't match the format of the data
> inside them. So it could drop %4 completely and just use
>
> rename %1?????.%2 %1%3????.%2
>
> Now all of this will typically hold for the old file names as created by
> the camera. Unfortunately, it imposes itself on the new file names,
> too, which restricts your naming conventions pretty severely.
>
> For example, as everyone, my images from the camera start out as
> "IMGPnnnn.PEF" or "IMGPnnnn.JPG". But my naming conventions need more
> space than four characters. For example, the shots from the 2003 Petit
> le Mans would be named "PlM03-nnnn.PEF".
>
> For film, there's also a marker in the name for which film roll it was,
> like "PlM03-04-nn.TIFF" (after scanning). Before the MZ-S, that would
> just be a sequential number from 01 through the number of rolls I shot
> at the event. Plus I'd shoot a "registration frame" at the beginning of
> each roll of an index card with the event name, date, and roll number so
> I could sort the rolls out after taking them in for processing.
>
> With the MZ-S I changed to using the "roll serial number" that the MZ-S
> burned onto the leader. I also dropped the "registration frames"
> because the "roll serial number" identified their order.
>
> After some serious efforts over a /long/ period of time, I've been
> unable to convince the built-in rename command to do any lengthening of
> the new name.
>
> --
> Thanks,
> DougF (KG4LMZ)
>
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