Re: Renaming under Dos 7

[Sam Martin semartin@xxxxxxxx]

Adriano, I should have been more explicit. The rename command handles *
and ? wildcards in the simple and most common cases, as when you want to
change all *.doc files to *.txt. But rename does not permit you to change
the names by attaching a prefix, suffix, or infix, or by removing letters.
Make five brief files called "Jan1.txt, Jan2.txt, Jan3.txt, Jan4.txt,
Jan5.txt". Now call for renamings like these:
 (1) ren jan*.* 99jan*.*
 (2) ren jan*.* janu*.*
 (3) ren jan*.* j*.*
 (4) ren jan*.* *.* [that is, remove the "jan" from each name]
I think you will see that the rename command (whether DOS 6 or 7) cannot
handle these tasks properly. Also, when it _does_ work there is no report
generated to tell you what it did. You have to make a directory call to
find out whether you got what you wanted. MREN handles these and more
complicated tasks quite readily, and gives an explicit report on each
renaming it has done.



On Wed, 6 Jan 1999, Adriano Ortile wrote:

> Sam Martin wrote:
> > DOS 7 seems to work quite well and seems little changed from DOS 6,
> except
> > that it permits long filenames, which I avoid. They didn't bother to
> > improve certain functions: the "rename" command still doesn't take
> > wildcards. Instead, use mren.com ("match-rename"), a freeware program
> that
> > works beautifully.
>
> Sam,
> I hope to not have misunderstood what you said, but I have no problem at
> all to rename files using wildcards: and this can done using both the Dos
> command "ren" and the File Manager ("winfile"). And, if I correctly
> remember, this was possible also with the previous versions of Dos.
> Am I incorrectly interpreting your words?
>
> Adriano Ortile
> ortile@xxxxxxxx
>
>