[mdlug] batch name changes

[Jonathan Billings]

> I am not a CLI user in Linux.  I am however a control freak.  I want
> to know what the commands mean.  Sometimes this information can be
> like pulling teeth to get it from CLI Gurus that figure everyone
> should know.  Well, you have to learn from some place.

I think a lot of people familiar with shell scripting can look at a
command and see it as self-descriptive.  I'm the type of person who
learns best by experimenting with it myself.

For what it's worth, you can take the various parts of the shell
invocations mentioned here, and split them into separate commands.
You can read the man pages for them, or play with them independently
to see how they work.  The only command that actually makes any
changes is the 'rename' command, and you probably want to avoid
running that with live data unless you're familiar with what you're
doing. 

For example, there's no harm in running the first find command alone
as it was written in the example.  All it does is print out all the
subdirectories' paths.

If you want to experiement, try replacing 'rename' with 'echo' (or put
an echo immediately before the rename).  The 'echo' command simply
prints out the remaining arguments on the command line, so if I typed
in 'echo 1 2 3', it'd print out '1 2 3' on a single line.  Often when
I'm tinkering with a command that's going to make a change, I'll put
an echo before the critical command so I can see what it was going to
do. 

-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>