import os
import re
 
[os.rename(s,re.sub(r"(\d{4})(\d{2})",r"\1-\2",s)) for s in os.listdir('.')]

The example above separates year-month dates using a dash (201201 -> 2012-01).

No I haven’t. I larked around with “FOR /F” until I read about sed on the web. Then you found your blog.
But I am not sure anymore, if sed is helping me further, since I am on Windows…

I understood, that sed is a Unix specific command. Is this correct? Do you know of an equivalent on Windows?

Thanks again!

it seems the you have quite some batch file programming experience!

Is it possible to replace “” with ” using sed?
(double quote replaced with single qoute)
I like to turn “”path”" to “path”.

Or do you know a side with a documentation for sed?

Guy – perhaps you could edit this for me and format the code.

I had no experience of sed or awk but quickly got a sed solution to almost solve my problem and then discovered that arithmetic is not easy with sed.

After much playing the following worked:

cd /test; find . -name "ts*" | awk -F, '{ print "mv *"$3","$4" "$3 -1000"-"$4 -1000".png" }' | sh

This changes the names of all files below /test which start with ‘ts’. My file names were 137 characters long and included many special characters. They ended with comma separated data which I wanted to retain and decrease by 1000. My solution separates the data with a hyphen and adds an extension. Whilst restricting ‘find’ to files starting with ‘ts’ is not necessary it ensures directory names are not included (unless they start with ts!) and prevents the modified names being modified again – these may not happen but I think this simple restriction is a wise precaution.