Little Tools

A bunch of little command-line tools that I find useful. Most of them are rewrites of shell or Ruby scripts I've had kicking around for years.

Install them with cargo install --path <name>, or do the whole lot in one go with ./install.sh.

align-times

Recursively makes timestamps of files in source/ match those in dest/.

alsort

Sorts files into directories based on the first letter of their name. The directories it creates will always be lower case, so MY_DOS_FILE.TXT goes into m/. If you supply the --group option, rather than using the single initial as the target directory name, it will pick one of abc, def, etc. Numbers go in 0-9, everything else goes in symbols.

cf

Counts files in directories, presenting info like wc, so it's easy to sort.

$ cf /etc /bin
        186     /etc
        942     /bin

Optionally recurses down trees, and can omit directories from the counts.

cs

Flattens fancy filenames to lowercase_ascii_with_underscores.

$ ls
90°.hot  'This Is A File.TXT'
$ cs *
90°.hot -> 90.hot
This Is A File.TXT -> this_is_a_file.txt
$ ls
90.hot  this_is_a_file.txt

flink

Links files as home-directory dotfiles.

fseq

Renames files to follow a pattern, with sequence numbers.

mixup

Mixes up bodies of text with granularity char, word, line, or file. If you give multiple files, the -i option will mix the files together first, then mix the result up with the specified granularity.

mmv

Batch renamer. Takes a find-and-replace pair, and subs find with replace in the names of the given files. Supports regular expressions and capture groups, and has a no-op mode for safe experimentation.

$ ls
file1.txt  file2.txt  file3.txt
$ mmv -v file renamed_file *
file1.txt file1.txt -> renamed_file1.txt
file2.txt file2.txt -> renamed_file2.txt
file3.txt file3.txt -> renamed_file3.txt
$ ls
renamed_file1.txt  renamed_file2.txt  renamed_file3.txt
$ mmv "re(\w+)(\d).txt" "number_\${2}_\${1}.text" *
$ ls
number_1_named_file.text  number_2_named_file.text  number_3_named_file.text

Has clobber-protection, multi-replace, and various levels of verbosity. --help explains.

--git prints out git mv commands, which you can paste back into your shell.

randos

Randomly selects a given number of files from a list or directory tree, and either symlinks, hard links, copies, or moves them to some other directory.

You can filter the source files by file extension, age, or a regular expression.

The new files can have new names, specified by the -s option.

• -s plain: the target filename is the same as the source filename.
• -s hash: the target filename is a SHA1 hash of the source file's full path.
• -s expand: the target filename is the source file's full path, but with / replaced by -.
• -s seq: the targets are named sequentially, from 00000001 upwards. The source file's extension (if any) is preserved.