[HN Gopher] First release of mmv for over 30 years
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First release of mmv for over 30 years
Author : sc3d
Score : 7 points
Date : 2021-03-14 10:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| sc3d wrote:
| I am the new maintainer of the venerable-yet-still-modestly-
| popular batch renaming utility, mmv (Debian popcon has 1.5k
| installs). I was astonished to find that other than a couple of
| bug fixes and a handful of portability patches by the Debian
| maintainers over the years, the code had remained pretty much
| untouched since 1990--quite an achievement by its original
| author, Vladimir Lanin, and his testers and helpers.
|
| I picked up mmv because, having used it for years myself, I
| noticed that it deliberately refused to rename directories. There
| seemed to be no technical reason it could not do this, so I
| lifted the restriction.
|
| I then took the opportunity to unifdef the code, ANSIfy it, add a
| modern command-line parser with gengetopt, use autotools and
| gnulib to make it more portable (including to Windows for the
| first time--the original version ran on DOS!), and remove custom
| code (including a memory allocator!) that is unnecessary on
| modern systems.
|
| I also removed the fragile support for interactive renaming,
| which didn't cope with various odd filenames; this functionality
| is already well-served by renameutils, and a more recent program
| also called mmv.
|
| The result is 60% the length of the original, most of the savings
| being from removing the DOS port. With a bit of luck, good for
| another 30 years!
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