Clinton's stuff place

Stop being scared of the terminal

I don't know about you, but sometimes I think that it's easier to point and click. I know that this isn't true, but sometimes it just feels nicer. This afternoon, I have been reordering a set of images for various image galleries which are automigically built using PHP's brilliant glob function. The thing is that in my cleverness, I had originally opted for a naming system of {gallery_name}#.jpg where # is a number indicating the image order.

My first attempts were taking quite literally hours for galleries of 25-50 images in size. This is because I downloaded the images, renamed each one individually using Finder on the Mac (which obviously led to file name conflicts) and taking all of that into account, it took 2-3 minutes per image (plus the time of working out which image needed to go in which position from a sheet of thumbnails).

My second attempt was using the command line on the server. This saved loads of time! But required a fair bit of typing which needed to be customised for each image. It was something along the lines of this:

mv cottagename-14.jpg cottagename-1.jpg;
mv t-cottagename-14.jpg t-cottagename-14.jpg

Brilliant! Then I thought that because of the patterns in filenames, I didn't need to type a lot of each out each time and by putting the whole thing into a shell script, I could type a single command, save myself a lot of keystrokes and kill two birds with just a single stone.

This is what I came up with:

#!/bin/sh
#
# utility to help move images and image thumbs for gallery
#
# Usage: ./thumb_move.sh imageIdentifier oldNumber newNumber
#
if [ $# -eq 3 ]
then
    echo "Moving $1-$2.jpg to ../$1-$3.jpg"
    echo "Moving t-$1-$2.jpg to ../t-$1-$3.jpg"
    mv $1-$2.jpg ../$1-$3.jpg
    mv t-$1-$2.jpg ../t-$1-$3.jpg
    exit 0
else
    echo "\nUsage:"
    echo "thumb_move imageIdentifier oldNo newNo"
    echo "\nWhere:"
    echo "imageIdentifier is the name used in image filenames\n"
    echo "oldNo is the old image number.\n"
    echo "newNo is the new image number.\n"
    exit 1
fi

The gallery which I've just reordered took only 20 minutes. Result!

Highlights of last year and hopes for this

Last year - highlights: