[barbarian]

I am looking for a quick way to do the following:

append ".mp3" to all the files in a specific folder that do not already end in ".mp3" (right now they are being read as text files.

Note that within the folder there are tons of nested subfolders...

Is there any easy way to do this?

[Partisan01]

Originally posted by barbarian:
I am looking for a quick way to do the following:

append ".mp3" to all the files in a specific folder that do not already end in ".mp3" (right now they are being read as text files.

Note that within the folder there are tons of nested subfolders...

Is there any easy way to do this?

I have three words for you

Perl
Regular Expressions

write a recursive function that goes through all the directories, and it checks if the file ends in .mp3, if not append it. I'm not the best at regular expressions, but about 10min of googling and 10min of coding and you should be set.

Nate

[Paul McCann]

Here's a simple approach that works OK on my tests. (Standard warning: check it out on a sample directory first!) It just uses some of the inbuilt goodness of zsh. At a terminal prompt ( % ) enter:

Code:
     zsh

Then enter

Code:
    for file in **/*~*.mp3(.)

You should see a "for>" symbol. Enter

Code:
    mv $file $file.mp3

and you're done. "exit" will get you out of zsh and you're back where you started, but hopefully without the renaming problem any more.

Best of luck,
Paul (who knows all too well that this could be done with find and exec, and maybe xargs and blah blah blah: but what fun would that be?)

[Gavin]

You have an apple script that does that

look in /Library/Scripts/Finder Scripts

run the one called "Add to File Names.scpt"



cheers

[Groovy]

Originally posted by barbarian:
I am looking for a quick way to do the following:

append ".mp3" to all the files in a specific folder that do not already end in ".mp3" (right now they are being read as text files.

Note that within the folder there are tons of nested subfolders...

Is there any easy way to do this?

IMHO the best way is to go to version tracker and download one of the many apps or contextual menus for the finder that does this for you.

[Ludovic Hirlimann]

Originally posted by Paul McCann:

Code:
    mv $file $file.mp3

mv "$file" "$file".mp3
will work a lot better with file that contains a space in their filename.

[Paul McCann]

Originally posted by Ludovic Hirlimann:
mv "$file" "$file".mp3
will work a lot better with file that contains a space in their filename.

Yes indeed: thanks for the correction. One day I'll remember that people really do use spaces in filenames.

Cheers,
Paul