#README for FileManagement repo#

This repo contains utilities that are useful for managing files in crowded directory subtrees, as happens a lot in corpus linguistics.

My favorite item is ''renamefiles'', which can do an awful lot of fancy things with filenames.

''bigDirTimer'' (Python) -- test your filesystem(s) for how badly they slow down on directories with very many files in them. Many slow down a lot.

''compareDirTrees'' -- compare the file inventories of two subtrees. This is mainly useful if you don't have a GUI tools for this, like meld, BeyondCompare, etc.

''countExtensions'' (bash) -- Inventory the file-extensions that occur in a given subtree.

''findAncestorDirectory'' -- This looks upwards to find the nearest containing directory that contains a given file, or is named a certain way. It's handy for finding where an "inheritable" files lives, such as .gitconfig, .venv, or similar.

''findDuplicateFiles'' (Python) -- Unpolished tool to search a subtree for duplicates.

''fixPermissions'' -- Check file extensions and if indicated, update the files' "execute" permission to match. For example, if you download or mount some .py (Python) files, this will make them executable. No easier than using chmod if you only have one such file, but very useful if you have a lot, with a mix of extensions. It should, but does not yet, also test via the file command.

''flattenDirs'' -- Copy (or --move) all descendants of the current directory, into a single destination directory. By default, puts the intermediate directory names onto the front of the resulting filename (so you don't lose the information), but with underscore instead of slash separating them. See 'splitBigDir' for a way to at least partially undo this.

''groupFiles'' -- Move (or copy) files into new sub-folders based on common parts of their names, such as by ignoring any final digits. It can also normalize extensions (htm vs. html), remove unusual characters from names, etc.

''lowerExtension'' (bash) -- force the extension of a file(s) to lower case. You can also do this with my ''renamefiles'', with a regex that uses \L.

''lscount'' (Perl) -- Report the number of files that match. With no arguments, reports the number of files in the current directory.

''lscruft'' (Perl) -- List files whose names suggest they are temp files, such as being named .bak, ~x, #foo#, Backup 3 of X, etc.

''lsoutline'' (Perl) -- Like ls but displays directory subtrees as outlines. Can include or omit the common leading portion. Also has various options such as including only directories, writing the output as HTML nested lists or graphviz diagrams, etc.

''lss'' (Python) -- (unfinished ls++)

''lstimes'' (Python) -- Attempt to extract and display every timestamp associated with a file. Experimental.

''macFinderInfo'' -- Attempt to show all the MacOS metadata (aka "finderInfo") for a file(s). Gets the list of available keys from file "macOsxSpotlightKeys.xsv"

''macOsxSpotLightKeys''.xsv -- A list of the names of MacOS fiile-system metadata items, used by renameFiles. These are also useful as arguments to the MacOS mdfind, mdls, and other commands. The list is probably incomplete, but should have most of the common ones.

''nextFilename'' (Python) -- Generate the first-available serial-number-suffixed version of a given filename.

''renameFiles'' (Python) -- An alternative to Linux rename, which I think is much, much nicer (and which works on BSD, MacOS, etc. as well). It lets you apply regex changes to filenames, but can also do many other operations:

• Find dates, normalize their format, and/or move them to the start of names
• Add ancestor directory names to the front of filenames (see also flattenDirs, above)
• Prepend file mod/creation/access times to names
• On Mac, where downloaded file often have the source URL stored as hidden metadata. for the file, extract that and insert it into the filename (dealing with "/", "%XX" codes, etc.)
• Recode or remove unusual characters from names.
• Resolve resulting name-conflicts by adding serial numbers of fixed width.
• Add, drop, normalize, or do various changes to file extensions.
• Convert between camel, snake, upper, lower, and bactrian case.
• Convert "Copy N of", "Copy (4)" and similar conventions to serial-numbers.
• Choose whether to affect directories, and/or "."-initial (hidden) files.
• Left-pad numbers in filenames so they're all the same width
• convert Roman numerals in filenames to decmal.

''setEmailFileTime'' (Python) -- This is intended to extract send-time from an email file (found in the MIME header), and set that file's mod-time in the file system to match. It's still experimental.

''splitBigDir'' (Perl) -- Split up the files in a (typically big) directory, into separate subdirectories (which are created as needed, or can be created elsewhere). By default, files are broken into groups based on the first character of their names. But you can group by the first N letters (optionally ignoring non-word characters and/or doing Unicode normalization), by file extension, my the first match to a given regex,

''spotlite'' (Perl) -- Use MacOS "Spotlight" search to find files. The main advantages over *nix find are that it's indexed (thus faster), and you can search on all kinds of metadata that find may not know about. It's build on top of mdfind, but hopefully much easier to use.

''watchDir'' -- Meh. Polls a specified directory and reports when it changes.