File renaming

[jeff12345]

I know it's a question that is asked often, but I still can't figure out a solution for my specific situation.

I have a directory full of files with names like these (These are the actual file names: note that they include spaces):

1 - Light My Fire
2 - Crystal Ship
....
10 - People Are Strange


For my MP3 player to play these files in the correct order, they need to be sorted alphabetically. So I need leading 0's on the file names beginning with 0 through 9. In other words, I want:

01 - Light My Fire
02 - Crystal Ship
...
10 People Are Strange

I have spent a couple of days playing with find -exec and various forms of xargs, and am still having no luck.

Any advice?

Thanks.

[Lakshmipathi]

Did you try rename command -- man page says

rename will rename the specified files by replacing the first occur-
rence of from in their name by to.

-V, --version
Display version information and exit.

For example, given the files
foo1, ..., foo9, foo10, ..., foo278, the commands

rename foo foo0 foo?
rename foo foo0 foo??

will turn them into foo001, ..., foo009, foo010, ..., foo278.

And
rename .htm .html *.htm

will fix the extension of your html files.

[blinky]

ls > /tmp/tmp.lst

cat /tmp/tmp.lst | while read a b
do
  i=`printf "%03d" $a`
  echo "mv \"$a $b\" \"$i $b\""
done

Starting point, you should be able to turn that into a script.

[jeff12345]

Thanks to both of you who responded. I tried the rename command, but couldn't figure out a perl expression to do exactly what I wanted. (I'm totally new at this.)

I did manage to adapte the shell script, and it works great. Just in case anybody else finds this thread, here's what I did to it:

ls | grep "^[0-9] -"> /tmp/tmp.lst

cat /tmp/tmp.lst | while read a b
do
i=`printf "%02d" $a`
mv "$a $b" "$i $b"
done

Thanks again.