Subfolder Renaming in ReNamer 4.65

FNW · 2007-06-30 16:30

First of all I want to thank you a lot for this very nice piece of useful software !
It just helped me a lot on my FTP server as I had to rename more than 1,200 files and folders...
While doing so, I noticed a strange behaviour in your program that seems to me like a little bug:
- First I changed the Filter Settings to also add folders as files (activation of the second option which is not selected by default)
- Afterwards I clicked on the "Add Folders" button and selected the folder I had to rename files and (sub)folders in
- In the next step I applied the following rule to all selected files and folders: Replace all " " with "_" (skip extension) because I wanted to get rid of the spaces in filenames to increase compatibility with some FTP clients
- Finally I clicked on the "Rename" button to get the job done
In the first run the program told me that about 1,000 files got renamed successfully but processing failed on the remaining 200. I was a bit confused and checked the files and folders which the software was unable to rename a bit more detailled. It seemed that the program tried to rename the subfolders of the main folder (the one I selected in the beginning) starting at the first level when later makes accessing the deeper levels impossible because the whole path got already changed before.
Probably a simple example can make a bit more clear what I mean because it is diffucult to describe.

Input folder: C:\Documents and Settings\User\Desktop\My Documents\School work\Maths
Desired output folder: C:\Documents_and_Settings\User\Desktop\My_Documents\School_work\Maths

I assume that the program tries to do this by performing these actions in the following order:
1) Rename the first-level subfolder of C:\, so it generates "C:\Documents_and_Settings\"
2) Try to rename the second-level subfolder of C:\ which is "C:\Documents and Settings\User\" which is not necessary as it contains no spaces, so there is not error message, yet.
3) Try to reanme the third-level subfolder (C:\Documents and Settings\User\Desktop\) which is also not necessary and still doesn't produce any errors.
4) Tring to rename the fourth-level subfolder (C:\Documents and Settings\User\Desktop\My Documents\) finally results in an error message because the path can't be found anymore. In the first step, the tool already changed the path of the first-level subfolder so this is not "C:\Documents and Settings\" but "C:\Documents_and_Settings\" (underscores already placed) now. Unfortunately this "path update" seems not to be stored by your program so renaming a multi-level subfolder structure always fails.

I'm not a programmer but I think either a simple re-sorting of the subfolder levels or storing the folder changes done during rename processing could help here and wouldn't be too much of work, I hope.
Please let me know if you understood my explanation or it's simple my fault that your software didn't work the way I wanted to...

Yours sincerely

Andreas Hüller (German student)

den4b · 2007-06-30 17:00

Yes, I know what you are talking about. I am well aware of this, and wouldn't consider this as a bug. This behavior has been discussed several times, and I've given a simple workaround, for example here: http://www.den4b.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=180. All you need to do is to sort the table by "Folder" column in reverse order. I cannot do automatic sorting, because this may affect the new names (for example when Serialize rule is used). It is something that users just have to be aware of, when renaming folders.

P.S. Right-click on the columns header to see the full list of columns. Left-click on the column by which you want to sort your files/folders.

FNW · 2007-06-30 17:41

Thank you very much for your suggestion.
I'm sorry for considering this behaviour a bug but I wasn't sure about it and also didn't know how to search the forum for this particular problem. But with your "trick", everything works perfectly so I will keep it in mind

Thanks again for offering such an useful tool for free - and even with first class support !

Andreas Hüller

den4b · 2007-06-30 19:28

You are welcome! Glad to be of help

den4b Forum

#1 2007-06-30 16:30

Subfolder Renaming in ReNamer 4.65

#2 2007-06-30 17:00

Re: Subfolder Renaming in ReNamer 4.65

#3 2007-06-30 17:41

Re: Subfolder Renaming in ReNamer 4.65

#4 2007-06-30 19:28

Re: Subfolder Renaming in ReNamer 4.65

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