Hi Amy,

Like Mendeley, suggested previously, Zotero + ZotFile and a variety of
BibTex tools will rename your PDFs neatly according to whatever rule you
feed it.
First step is of course to have your metadata in order - all of them will
pull in metadata automagically, but some manual corrections and additions
would be necessary before renaming the whole batch.

Regards,
Erwin
ᐧ

On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 6:15 PM, Pikas, Christina K. <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Did anyone already suggest Mendeley - I think it will do this for you with
> zero coding whatsoever. In fact, you can point Mendeley at the directory
> and it will suck them in automatically and rename the pdfs if you have it
> set that way.
>
> Of course this only works with published research articles - coding is
> needed for the general case.
> Christina
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Alexander Duryee
> Sent: Friday, January 15, 2016 11:19 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] A smart bulk file name editor?
>
> Amy,
>
> It sounds like this is a three-step process for each file:
>
> 1) Feed the PDF (as a data blob) into a script
> 2) Parse out the data that you're looking for (title, author, year)
> 3) Build a string using your parsed data, and move the file to that new
> filename
>
> 1 and 3 should be simple with any scripting language; unfortunately, 2 may
> be very difficult.  PDF is not a structured data format, so there's no
> guarantee that the data you need can be easily parsed out.  If the PDFs
> were uniformly generated (e.g. they were all generated from LaTeX markup or
> a single content management system) then it may be possible to parse out
> information from the file.  If not - for example, if the PDFs consist of
> scanned pages - then you'll need to generate that data elsewhere (perhaps
> from an existing catalog), create the new filenames that way, and feed that
> list into a script/tool to rename the files.
>
> Best of luck,
> --Alex
>
> On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 11:06 AM, Chris Moschini <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > It won't surprise you coders do this all the time and so there are 80
> > ways to do this, so your peril is choice not scarcity.
> >
> > Although there are a ton of tools that will do this for non-coders:
> > https://www.google.com/webhp?q=file%20renamer
> >
> > On Windows robocopy is popular.
> >
> > The truth is though most coders just pick the programming language of
> > their choice and go for it. The most common is Bash and regex. Bash is
> > built-in to Linux and Macs and pretty easy to
> > <https://git-for-windows.github.io/>
> > get
> > onto Windows <https://www.cygwin.com/>. It's an old and ugly language
> > but it's also the kitchen sink of "I just need to do this quick
> > thing." That said if you dislike old and ugly languages or unintuitive
> > syntax or command names, pick a programming language you do like, or one
> of the tools above.
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 10:56 AM, Amy Schuler
> > <[log in to unmask]>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Hi,
> > > I'm looking for a smart bulk file editor, if it exists.
> > > Specifically I'd like it to be able to move through a list of PDF
> > > files that are published research papers, and rename them in this
> > > approximate format, based on the contents of the file:
> > > firstauthor_firstfewwordsoftitle_year.pdf
> > >
> > > I know this is probably a crazy dream.  The bulk file editors that I
> > > know about are more simple.  They can bulk rename files according to
> > > a pre-set pattern or they just remove/add/re-position bits from the
> > > existing file string.
> > >
> > > Thanks!
> > >
> > > Amy Schuler
> > > Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
> > > [log in to unmask]
> > >
> >
>