How do I rename multiple files beginning with a Unix timestamp - imapsync issue

Question

I didn't got the script from imapsync to rename maildir filenames to work. :-/

So what I need is:

I have a mail folder with thousands of mails. After importing those emails to my new server, the filename of the emails got the creation date as a Unix timestamp in the filename, but the creation date flag of the file is the correct receive date from the email.

ls -l for one file looks like this:

-rw-r--r-- 1 popuser popuser  1350432 2013-03-16 07:22 1363563215.M562903P29332V0000000000000802I0000000000AEA46B_527.my-domain.org,S=1350432:2,S

So what the script has to do is: 1) read the creation date/time of the file (I found the command

stat -c %y filename

does this)

2) convert the date/time from 1) to a Unix timestamp

date -d "2013-03-17 11:19:01.000000000 +0100" "+%s"

3) delete the first 10 digits (wrong timestamp) of the filename and us the the timestamp from 2) instead

4) do this for all files in a specific directory

I'm a newby in Linux scripts, can anyone help me with this script?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Try doing this with rename :

$ rename -n 's/^\d+/(stat($_))[9]/e' [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]*

from the shell prompt. It's very useful, you can put some perl code like I does in a substitution for stat with the e modifier.

You can remove the -n (dry-run mode switch) when your tests become valids.

warning http://pix.toile-libre.org/upload/original/1377510865.png There are other tools with the same name which may or may not be able to do this, so be careful.

If you run the following command (linux)

$ file $(readlink -f $(type -p rename))

and you have a result like

.../rename: Perl script, ASCII text executable

and not containing:

ELF

then this seems to be the right tool =)

If not, to make it the default (usually already the case) on Debian and derivative like Ubuntu :

$ sudo update-alternatives --set rename /path/to/rename

(replace /path/to/rename to the path of your perl's rename command.

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If you don't have this command, search your package manager to install it or do it manually

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Last but not least, this tool was originally written by Larry Wall, the Perl's dad.

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Edit

As stated here, if you have the following error :

Argument list too long

Then use find like this :

find -type f -name '[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]*' -print0|
    xargs -0 -n1 rename -n 's/^\d+/(stat($_))[9]/e' 

(try it without -n1, that should works too)