Name a renamer

A few days ago I mentioned a nifty command-line loop that converts out of proprietary music formats and into ogg, by coupling mplayer with oggenc. That was a good find, although I’m still poking around looking for some sort of console application that makes file renaming a little bit easier — something along the line of gprename, which I hold in high regard.

I look, but I don’t find much. I understand the standard rename command, but it’s still a bit awkward for my needs — I’d love something that would handle insertion and deletion, renumbering and search-and-replace, with a little more deftness.

I also spotted a few other tools (which I should leave unnamed), but those likewise seemed rather obtuse. I know some folks who are more programming-savvy are probably comfortable with the flags and switches and so forth that would make those work how I need, but something with an interface is more to my liking. I am not afraid to admit I have all the programming ability of a brick.

A long time ago, for some bizarre reason, I installed the renameutils package in Ubuntu, and used the qmv tool to direct-rename some files. That package is easily built and installed in Crux, and again that seems like the most practical solution for me. Pipe the files through vim, use the search-and-replace there or just plain edit them straightaway, and then get them renamed in one fell swoop.

Not exactly the “interface” I was looking for, but better for me than cryptic, hard-to-troubleshoot lines of variables and codes. If you know of anything that can fill out most of the functions of something like gprename, and run almost as fluidly, I’d be delighted to hear about it.