Can command-line commands be made insensitive to order of filenames and options

command line

I'm new to Mac usage. It seems that most commands trip over options given after the file names. In linux, which I've used for years, it doesn't matter. On Apple, it does. Is there some setting somewhere or some hack to make commands like ls behave "normal"?

dwilson 0====> ls -l p*
-rw-r--r--@ 1 dwilson  owner  184 Jul 29 13:57 poo.c
-rw-r--r--@ 1 dwilson  owner  133 Jul 29 13:57 poo.h

dwilson 0====> ls p* -l
ls: -l: No such file or directory
poo.c        poo.h

dwilson 1====>

Best Answer

The reason for this is that Mac OS X uses BSD utils (which have a specific order to their parameters), whereas Linux uses the GNU utils, which can accept arguments in any order.

You can download and compile the GNU coreutils package, which should provide you with the utilities you're used to; I would recommend just getting used to the BSD utils, however, as you'll otherwise have problems moving to other systems. The BSD method works fine on GNU systems, but the GNU method is less portable.

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ls | perl -nl -e '/(.*)(S[0-9]+E[0-9]+).*(\.mp4)/ && print "mv \"" . $_ . "\" \"". $1 . $2 . $3 . "\""'

How does this work? First ls outputs the list of files, one per line, like so:

The.Big.Bang.Theory.S01E01.xxxxxxxx.mp4
The.Big.Bang.Theory.S01E02.somecrap.mp4
The.Big.Bang.Theory.S04E12.otherjunk.mp4

Then perl -nl splits this into lines, feeding each to the regex, much like awk*. The regex captures 3 groups (denoted by parentheses), first the bit before SxxEyy, then that, then the file suffix. It then simply assembles a mv command suitable for renaming the files, like so:

mv "The.Big.Bang.Theory.S01E01.xxxxxxxx.mp4" "The.Big.Bang.Theory.S01E01.mp4"
mv "The.Big.Bang.Theory.S01E02.somecrap.mp4" "The.Big.Bang.Theory.S01E02.mp4"
mv "The.Big.Bang.Theory.S04E12.otherjunk.mp4" "The.Big.Bang.Theory.S04E12.mp4"

This can then be inspected and once you're satisfied it does what you want, piped into a shell by appending: | sh.

*awk would normally be a good tool to use for this, but sadly only GNU awk supports regex capture groups and Mac OS X doesn't include gawk by default.

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My AppleScript-fu isn't up to the task of providing you with the necessary code, but I think you're most likely to find the solution by leveraging the Keychain.

Best Answer

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