2014/10/17

Machine-readable Dates

I had some directories named in the format of “Jul 18, 2012”. Thanks, iPhoto export, but no thanks.

/bin/ls | while read dirnam; do 
  echo "$dirnam" | grep -Eq '^\w{3} \d{1,2}, \d{4}$'
  if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then 
    newdir=`gdate -d "$dirnam" +%F`
    mv -i "$dirnam" "$newdir"
  fi
done

/bin/ls | while read dirnam; do

echo "$dirnam" | grep -Eq '^\w{3} \d{1,2}, \d{4}$'

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then

newdir=`gdate -d "$dirnam" +%F`

mv -i "$dirnam" "$newdir"

done

Note: gdate is GNU date after doing homebrew install coreutils.

Update:

Some of the directories created where in the form “Jul 18, 2012-2”. In order to rename those as well I ran a subsequent command (don’t run this before the first invocation above – I don’t know how that will turn out):

/bin/ls | while read dirnam; do 
  echo "$dirnam" | grep -Eq '^\w{3} \d{1,2}, \d{4}'
  if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then 
    newdir=`gdate -d "${dirnam%-2}" +%F`
    mv -i "${dirnam}" "${newdir}-2"
  fi
done

/bin/ls | while read dirnam; do

echo "$dirnam" | grep -Eq '^\w{3} \d{1,2}, \d{4}'

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then

newdir=`gdate -d "${dirnam%-2}" +%F`

mv -i "${dirnam}" "${newdir}-2"

done

Machine-readable Dates is original content from devolve.

Tags:command line, data wrangling, Mac, sysadmin

About The Author

Charlie Herron

Denizen of Portland, Maine; tech jack; lover / hater / whatever; philosophical dabbler. http://twitter.com/realgeek