I just wrote my own version of your script. Not that it's better than yours, just different. I've learned a lot from this list by seeing how people do things differently than me! I hope you find my version helpful.
A couple of notes about mine:
1) The directory is taken from the command line instead of prompting when run. This means you can throw it in a cron job or the windows equivalent, and it will run without human intervention. If a directory is not specified, the current directory is assumed. Run it like this:
rename.pl /path/to/dir
2) My regex makes sure that the -[0-9]-[0-9] (in the regex as -\d-\d) comes before a .txt or .doc or some other three letter extension at the end of the filename, per your description in your script. This makes sure that the following files do NOT get renamed:
bad-1-2filename.txt bad-1-2.txtfilename.doc bad-1-2.nota3letterextension
3) I decided to "warn" instead of "die" if a file cannot be renamed for whatever reason. That way, you might have 1000 files that get renamed and 1 that does not. Obviously, if you want to die if there are any failures, the warn can be changed into a die, but note that you still might have successfully renamed some files before the die occurs. The downside to the warn is that if all of your files cannot be renamed, then you're going to get a lot of error messages printed on the screen.
4) I'm using File::Find to get all of the filenames. My "return" in the Rename subroutine can be removed if you want to do the renaming in all subdirectories instead of just in the directory specified, although it's probably a good idea to leave in the check (-f $old) to make sure we're renaming a file and not a symlink or a directory.
5) I'm also doing a check to make sure that the new filename is differently named than the old one by checking the success of the regex. I don't think that renaming a file to it's own name will break anything, but logically I like that in there. A performance gain or maybe even a loss, perhaps, I don't know, but probably not worth caring about if there is one.
Pete
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict; use File::Find;
my $dir=$ARGV[0]; $dir='.' if (!defined $dir); die "$dir is not a valid directory." if (!-d $dir); $dir=~s#/$##;
find(\&Rename, $dir);
##########################################
sub Rename {
my $old=$File::Find::name;
return if ((!-f $old) or ($old=~m#$dir/\S+/#));
my $new=$old;
if ($new=~s/-\d-\d(\.\S{3})$/$1/) {
rename $File::Find::name, $new or warn "Could not rename $File::Find::name: $!"; }
}
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