Find and replace mulitple charaters in filenames Post: 302758477

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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Find and replace mulitple charaters in filenames Post 302758477 by Don Cragun on Saturday 19th of January 2013 05:07:09 PM

01-19-2013

Registered User

Quote:

Originally Posted by barrydocks

Thanks for the replies.

Yes you are probably correct, creation date would probably be the best.

@Don Cragun
Thanks for your advice, unfortunately most of it is completely over my head - hence why I post on here for help - I am not an IT professional Smilie

The idea is that a pdf will be produced by front-of-house staff from a word document that is populated from an MS Access application Smilie

using a virtual cups-pdf printer on my ubuntu server. The pdf will then need to have the characters added by the pdf printer removed, the creation date added and moved to a new directory. From the new location the pdf will be edited by a user (me) on a tablet pc (probably an iPad Smilie

) and then attached back to the MS Access record. I was planning to run the script that alters the pdf filename every 30secs or so as a cron job from a unprivileged user home directory. Hopefully this all makes sense?

I am open to better suggestions if you have any Smilie

Thanks

OK. Back to basics:
1. Will all of the files you want to rename be in the same directory? If so, what is the name of that directory? If not, what are the names of all of the directories that will contain pdf files you want to rename?
2. What is the name of the directory where you want to place the renamed pdf files?
3. When you run the command:

Code:

uname -a

what is the output?

If you want a script to run every 30 seconds, cron won't be sufficient; its finest granularity is 1 minute. And, if the system is busy, you could end up having two copies of your script running at the same time. If you run a script to rename files every few minutes after a file is converted, the likelihood that the current date and the file's creation date are different is pretty low (especially if the front end people who create the pdf files don't work between 11pm and 1am).

Don Cragun

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

xfig-pdf-viewer

XFIG-PDF-VIEWER(1)						Debian Users Manual						XFIG-PDF-VIEWER(1)

NAME

       xfig-pdf-viewer - view a PDF document using a PDF browser under X11

SYNOPSIS

       xfig-pdf-viewer file.pdf

DESCRIPTION

       xfig-pdf-viewer is a little shell script, which tries to find out which PDF viewers you have installed on your system and then starts them.
       xfig-pdf-viewer tries the following PDF viewers with descending priority:

       -  xpdf(1)

       -  kpdf(1)

       -  evince(1)

       -  acroread(1)

       -  gpdf(1)

       -  gv(1)

       -  gnome-gv(1)

       -  kghostview(1)

       -  ghostview(1)

       If the environment variable PDFVIEWER is set, this is used with highest priority.

ENVIRONMENT

       PDFVIEWER
	      you can define your favorite browser with this variable, it overrides the priority of the above mentioned viewers.

AUTHOR

       Roland Rosenfeld <roland@spinnaker.de>

SEE ALSO

       xpdf(1), kpdf(1), evince(1), acroread(1), gpdf(1), gv(1), gnome-gv(1), kghostview(1), ghostview(1)

Debian Project							     JULY 2006							XFIG-PDF-VIEWER(1)

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