Hello all. Problem: I plan to rename a few thousand photos with names like imgp4711.jpg and imgp0042.pef to a date indexed version: yyyy-mm-dd_hh-mm-ss_nnnn.type where nnnn is a running number from the exif header. and type is the original filetype (.jpg, .pef, .tif etc) I opted for bash, and started lokking around. I have checked google and i have read the man-pages, but i'll be danged if i can understand the syntax. I first tried getting the date and time from the header by doing: head <filename> | strings | grep 200 (to get any line with 200(6) in it.) Result: 2006:01:12 08:09:52 2006:01:12 08:09:52 2006:01:12 08:09:52 (yes i get it three times) I then tried: head <filename> |strings | grep 200 | sed 's/\:/-/g' Result: 2006-01-12 08-09-52 2006-01-12 08-09-52 2006-01-12 08-09-52 Nice! Now i have the dashes done Then i got stuck on how to replace the blank with '_' and remove the trailing two lines. AND this method doesn't give me the frame number New approach: I extract date, time and frame with 'exiftool' which gives me exiftool -f -Date -Time -FrameNumber filename Date : 2006:01:12 Time : 08:09:52 Frame Number : 1845 That gave me all three. Date, time and frame I then suppressed the tags: exiftool -f -S -s -Date -Time -FrameNumber filename 2005:03:28 21:56:15 1865 added " | sed 's/\:/-/g' " to the line and got 2005-03-28 21-56-15 1865 Now i am getting somewhere.. But this is where i get stuck... I haven't found anything i found useful on google, and the manpages on sed, awk, grep and bash is way to cryptic for me. How do i get the three lines joined into 2005-03-28_21-56-15_1865.jpg How do i preserve the file ending? And how do i error check for nonexisting data. If the image doesn't have a correct header the exiftool will output a '-' in that position. Date: - Time: - FrameNumber: - In that case i would want the script to use current date/time and 0000 as the frame... I have almost no programming experience at all, so any pointers fit for a non-programmer is most welcome. TIA -- /Rikard ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- email : rikard.j@rikjoh.com web : http://www.rikjoh.com mob : +46 (0)736 19 76 25 ------------------------ Public PGP fingerprint ---------------------------- < 15 28 DF 78 67 98 B2 16 1F D3 FD C5 59 D4 B6 78 46 1C EE 56 >