Assuming that the leading number and period is part of the filename:
If the directory-browsing thing supports natural sorting of numbers, you can use that; this will detect numbers within the filename and sort by them. For example, I use emacs’s dired to browse directories and play movies. It can modify the flags passed to ls, and ls supports natural sorting of numbers in filenames with the -v flag. Doing this in dired means C-u s v RET, and the directory will be displayed sorted numerically.
If the directory-browsing thing doesn’t support that, rename to a “0”-padded format such that a lexicographic order has the same ordering as numeric order:
$ for f in *; do
n="$(printf %04d ${f%%.*})"
mv "$f" "$(echo $f|sed s/^[0-9]*/$n/)"
done
That way,
1. Episode_One.mp4
will become
0001. Episode_One.mp4
and so forth, and so software that can only do lexicographic orderings is happy.
If the leading number and period isn’t part of the filename, then we need to parse human-language strings.
$ npm install words-to-numbers
$ for f in *; do
w="$(echo $f|sed -r "s/^Episode_([^.]*).mp4/\1/")"
n=$(echo $w|node -e 'wn=require("words-to-numbers"); const l=require("readline").createInterface({input:process.stdin, output:process.stdout, terminal:false}); rl.on("line", l=> {console.log(wn.wordsToNumbers(l));})')
nf=$(printf %04d $n)
mv "$f" "$nf. $f"
done
That’ll rename to the format mentioned above in option 2:
This is why I love Lemmy. There’s a meme post and then someone writes a 7 page long technical solution like they were paid contributor at stack overflow.
The first case is the most-likely for most people, and the simplest to do. Most directory browsers do support numeric sorting.
In the second case, I provided a Perl program in another comment in the thread that provides a generic way to do this with one command for nearly all files of this sort.
The third case, where human-language stuff needs to be parsed, true enough, doesn’t just have a button to push.
Assuming that the leading number and period is part of the filename:
If the directory-browsing thing supports natural sorting of numbers, you can use that; this will detect numbers within the filename and sort by them. For example, I use emacs’s dired to browse directories and play movies. It can modify the flags passed to
ls, andlssupports natural sorting of numbers in filenames with the-vflag. Doing this in dired meansC-u s v RET, and the directory will be displayed sorted numerically.If the directory-browsing thing doesn’t support that, rename to a “0”-padded format such that a lexicographic order has the same ordering as numeric order:
That way,
will become
and so forth, and so software that can only do lexicographic orderings is happy.
If the leading number and period isn’t part of the filename, then we need to parse human-language strings.
That’ll rename to the format mentioned above in option 2:
will become
And lexicographic sorting will work.
You know what, I’ll just manually rename the files
This is why I love Lemmy. There’s a meme post and then someone writes a 7 page long technical solution like they were paid contributor at stack overflow.
Never change <3
Wow is it really that simple? I wonder why not everybody does that! 🤣
The first case is the most-likely for most people, and the simplest to do. Most directory browsers do support numeric sorting.
In the second case, I provided a Perl program in another comment in the thread that provides a generic way to do this with one command for nearly all files of this sort.
The third case, where human-language stuff needs to be parsed, true enough, doesn’t just have a button to push.
That may be true for terminal applications, but even on Linux most GUI file browsers don’t support that, at least not out of the box.