Bulk renaming of files, also known as batch renaming or mass renaming, is the process of changing the names of multiple files simultaneously.
This is typically done to make file names more organized, consistent, and meaningful. Bulk renaming is a useful task in various scenarios. For example, it’s useful when you have a large number of files with generic or cryptic names and you want to give them more descriptive names, or when you want to standardize the naming convention for a group of files.
Bulky is GUI software that lets you rename files and directories. While it’s developed by Linux Mint it’s not tied to any Linux distribution or desktop. It’s free and open source software.
Installation
We tested Bulky with the Manjaro distro. It’s a rolling-distro that’s based on the wonderful Arch.
There’s a package for Bulky in Manjaro’s official repositories so a manual build isn’t necessary. We can install Bulky with pamac (Manjaro’s GUI package manager), pacman, or a helper such as yay.
$ yay -S bulky
The project’s GitHub repository provides a packages.tar.gz file which is a compressed tarball. Extracting that file shows it to be a .deb file i.e. a package for Debian/Ubuntu distributions.
The full source code is also available if there’s not a package available for your distro of choice.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
This looks nice – but we’re still waiting for perfection here.
I like GPRename, but it can only do 1 job at a time (and if you select 3 files from a directory, it’ll open 3 windows… select 1 file and it loads all files in one window).
KRename is sweet, looks a bit like Bulky (separate window for ‘find and replace’, entry of rules to apply later etc).
I wonder if anyone will put together all the good features into a new app some day without leaving essential functions out? Something like Drag ‘n Drop, for example…
There’s no such thing as perfection with software.
That’s very true. Software can always be improved.
You don’t have to be savvy or know how to write code to offer suggestions about improving a program. The important thing is to take the effort to offer well-thought out suggestions, and raise bugs you find (every program has bugs).
I’ve no knowledge of Rust, but I made some suggestions to the developer of tap (a music player) in my recent review that I thought would massively improve tap such as gapless playback, volume control, and caching on startup.
The developer of tap has implemented all of my suggestions in less than 2 weeks. tap is now just mind-staggeringly awesome.
Sure, a terminal-based music player won’t be the perfect fit for everyone. And there’s still a few things I will suggest that would make it even more awesome.
I guess it depends on the developer and how interested they are hearing suggestions. When I raised an issue on a GitHub repository the developer closed it without comment.
Yes, that does happen. When I raised an issue re memory consumption of a music program, the developer just closed it saying it’s fine to have a simple music program using over 1GB of RAM for a moderate sized music collection. The huge memory usage is just for caching cover art at high resolutions.
But, like anything, a bizarre incident shouldn’t put anyone off raising issues. Many open source developers are very grateful for feedback.
Yeah it looks quite limited wrt GUI functionality. Regex is powerful, though those who master that will be fine with cli.
As a point of comparison you might want to look at a windows counterpart; Bulk Rename Utility.KRename does offer some quite useful and intuitive features, though BRU has more to offer.
Did this in PERL.