STOP! Don't Name That File Without First Watching This Video.
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ต.ค. 2022
- In this video, I talk about a very important topic that doesn't get discussed as much as it should, especially regarding individual desktop computer users. And that topic is File Naming Conventions, which are frameworks to help guide you in giving your files more descriptive names that make them easier to identify, search, sort, etc.
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I usually just use "Untitled", because this is what the software seems to recommend.
Yep. It's always smart to follow what's recommended. And it follows a consistent pattern as well
Untitled, Untitled (1), Untitled (2), etc...
@@Stilllife1999 I usually get untitled, untitled copy, untitled copy copy, etc, sadly, it is not always consistent, there is also untitled, untitled copy 1, untitled copy 2, etc , untitled, untitled 1, untitled 2, etc, untitled, untitled_1, etc, untitled, untitled-1, etc. i have seen too many
>me looking for that cake recipe link I saved in Untitled (537).txt
And all folders are "new folder" "new folder (1)" and so on. Very simple.
I use underscore as a folder naming convention.
It acts as a separator when viewing paths.
Doing that for me is easier on the eye.
My script naming convention is... "4 (name of script) .sh"
My use of "4" means "for".
This allows me to reuse existing names without conflict @ /usr/bin
(eg. a script that launches a urxvt script becomes... 4urxvt.sh).
I personally prefer underscore for file names.
Why? Because, when you program something, underscores can be selected a lot easily.
You can just double-click the name and it_selects_everything_with_underscore.
If you use hyphens, you-will-have-troubles-selecting-stuff.
However, for dates, it is hard to make it readable with underscores...
I do like that you use the year-month-day format, as it is the superior format for dates.
A remark about file capitalization:
You said that, when downloading a file on a web browser, on Windows, it will overwrite the existing file.
This is not true. Browsers will add (1) or (2) or (3) or (*n*) after the file.
yyyy.mm.dd for dates make building timelines easy.
@@MadRat70
I think it doesn’t really matter as long as it’s consistent.
I’d avoid dots and reserve those for file extensions (and possibly version numbers?)
Hyphenated dates actually works well with underscores if you want them to be grouped separately.
Though I admit I usually just concatenate the date without internal delimiters. But I’m used to reading 20221019 as a date.
@@zemoxian Either way, as long as you are consistent the timeline is built. But mix styles and chaos is assured.
I\ just\ hate\ having\ to\ escape\ my\ spaces
@@zemoxian Concatenating is even better.
You can order it numerically, alphabetically and in natural order, and everything will always be in the exact same order.
I used to work in IT and file naming conventions was one of our major problems. No one ever stuck to them so we used to provide software for automatically naming files, either from user input or from reading the content and original location. We found people would not invest time or money in naming conventions - they thought that content searching would sort it all out for them. Those with lots of money and documents bought Microsoft Sharepoint ! (and never found anything ever again)
So it's not just the front end people who are more into the dirty side... Dammit. Maybe I idealized programming in my head too much.
I had the same problem as an IT person at the state level: there were all these procedures we needed to know but finding them was ridiculous. They were in Sharepoint, Drive, email attachments, and Teams chat file share. I didn't last there long because my supervisor didn't like me making her look Stuart Pitt (-art -tt +d) and ineffective. The public sector in the USA is allergic to innovation and good ideas.
I see people name files "0filename", "00filename" etc. Meanwhile I just make excessive use of directories, you know, the things your filesystem provides to help you organize your files
I've done that at least once, with the folder in my Documents (windows) named "0". Since a bunch of programs like to make directories in Documents making a whole bunch of them. Otherwise, whenever I have a bunch of files in a directory that I revisit or are related in some way, I just do the obvious thing and put them in a directory named after their common trait. Where are my profile pics? In Documents\0\profile, of course.
@@BradenBest Nah. I keep 00 as a prefix for
00-INFO-s-stands-for-schedule
and the like.
I should really consider quitting this quirk.
I use hyphens to separate words, but underscores to separate "fields". If I have an author/artist name and a title in a file name, I'll use an underscore for that.
the patrician's approach
Another point to consider is the selection behaviour. In most applications/OSes a double click on hello_world will select the whole word. A double click on hello-world will only select hello or world (depending on where you clicked). Usually i want to select the whole filename, especially while using filenames in source code. Thats why i use underscores as a separator. But the use case may vary.
Nice video btw 🙂
I prefer the look of dashes personally but this might be the reason I make the change
I'll use an underscore where there is a natural "space" but use a hypen to seperate the things between. So for example _-_my-project-name. That let's me to easily seperate groups of information in the name of a file. Same goes for direcorites too, I actually like for the non-dot, visible directory names to have Proper English Casing. I suppose it's a matter of semantics, since they represent "nouns" in the home directory usually and are what is visible in the GUI and a typical ls I want them to 1- look nice, and 2- be "proper" (in the English language sense)
Also, it's good to know that NTFS is selectively able to work case sensitivity and a system user can enable it on a per-directory basis. So, this especially comes in handy if they are using WSL. Beyond that a person can use it with Windows itself as well, if they choose. Windows doesn't care, it's just that the default is insensitivity. So anyone working with linux files on a Windows machine can easily work with them in a more native format if they want to.
As a programmer I use underscores since a lot of programming languages like python have problems with hyphen since they also represent subtractions.
same here, it is easier to use hyphen, but underscore is consistent.
As a JS dev, I just camel-case everything lol
I just use underscores for Python and hyphens for everything else.
I work with firmware writing c and we follow the Linux Kernel style which uses underscores. I actually prefer it way more than camel case or hyphens as it’s way easier to read multi word variables or functions
@@zanguusu think he meant using hyphens in variables when writing code not reading file names
Subdirectory structure should be the first component of any naming convention to organise user files.
Totally agreed with that. Everything in one folder is a big no-no.
I like using a reverse-DNS naming style for large directory structures. I was inspired by how Usenet is able to nest so many categories in newsgroups in a hierarchical fashion while still being memorable and easy to type.
Wow, Greg, yeah, I said same thing. Subdirectories are very important too.
@@samgould8567 What do you mean by reverse-DNS naming style? Can you give examples?
Johnny Decimal is a great system for this.
I made this mistake in my first semester of college. All files for all subjects were keysmashes and dumped in the same folder.
Next semester was ---.pdf all sorted into folders. So organised
I'm glad you shared your ideas about this. I was starting to fear I was the only one who gave any thought to these kinds of conventions. I work at an academic institution where we exchange a lot of files. As far as I can tell, I'm the only one who has a file naming convention; everyone else names files inconsistently and haphazardly. As a result, we have chaos in our shared repositories and it drives me nuts. Since they're accessed through web interfaces, I can't even use grep. It's crazy. I proposed a system and spent a lot of time cleaning up some of the repositories, but I was ignored.
I've carefully written up my system. In fact, I basically follow a spec, and my files are automatically processed by scripts, so that enforces consistency and also allows for some very convenient automation. If my file name is incorrect, it doesn't parse, so I have to be serious about it.
I use both underscores and dashes (as well as periods) in file names. This makes it easier for me to read and parse. Generally, periods are the highest level separators, underscores are middle level, and dashes lowest level. So, for instance, if I want a date in the file name, the date is set off by underscores, but the fields inside the date are separated by dashes, as in
MyFile_2023-05-16.tex
I also use upper case freely to additional structure and readability. I don't have any reason to care about the default behavior of Windows; I don't use Windows.
I have conventions for version numbers, file variations, dates, etc. I also have a system of file types, which allows me to distinguish, for instance, between files that have original ideas versus notes I've taken, versus configuration files, journals, etc. It probably takes me at most a few seconds to open just about any file on my system that I created, and I have many thousands of original files.
I use Emacs to open files, even if I don't edit them in Emacs. That way I can use the Emacs name completion system, bookmarking, etc.
I didn't even know I needed this. Great content !!
Good advice. Hyphens preferable to underscores for the reasons you mentioned in relation to URLs being underlined.
I was just thinking about this a couple of days ago. Thank you! This was really helpfull! :D
I mix hyphens and underscores in file names. I don't care about Windows users either or if they'll have problems with my filenames. Though I do try to keep to just lowercase because it's easier for me to type. However, there are always exceptions for me on that front, such as one I saw you have, AppImages, and my main folders in home which are still default names. On dates, my default screenshot name uses hyphens for the date and underscores for the time, though I'm perfectly fine with using colon as a time separator, and also setting a variable in bash with the date will only partially work. For instance, same day usage of a terminal window will correctly report the date, but if you keep the window open past midnight it'll still yield the previous date. *A* solution, which will only work from the terminal and not in shell scripts is to alias the date command and use `alias_in_question` as part of a filename. If using a shell script it would be helpful to use ~/.bash_aliases and just source it for scripts as well. Let's say you do:
alias T='date +"%H:%M:%S"' ; touch foo_bar-baz\:\:`T`; # and that'll work.
For time, I also see the colons replaced with "h" for "hour" and 24-hour format so that the time is listed sequentially when alphabetized. So instead of "1:35 p.m." it's "13h35" which will come after "01h35" or "1:35 a.m."
There was a lot of headscratching trying to find descriptive file names back in the DOS era with some limitations: filename 8 chars max, extension 3 chars max, originally only A-Z, 0-9 and some other characters could be used (can't remember them anymore).
Never has File naming been more important than after I started video making. So damn many files 🤣😵💫
I agree with almost everything you've said: no spaces, no special characters, all lowercase, etc. The only thing I do differently is I use both hyphen and underscore. The reason? They allow me to organize files better. I can match all the characters before the hyphen and create folders based on that "prefix."
In some languages, hyphen has a specific use already similar to that of the word in-situ, for example. German and Finnish are two examples of those languages in Europe. In this case, underscore should be preferred in order not to confuse the meaning.
This was a very good and helpful video about organizing files. I do a lot of these things, but I also use directories to help keep my files separate. But date & time is also good idea. For me, I append something like this: "-v001 (10-15-2022)", "-v002 (10-21-2022)", etc. It helps me version stuff by date.
Good video, but you really should append the date to the beginning of the file. It's much easier to sort stuff that way and it's more readable.
the tip about using date was mindblowing. I have to learn more about the Linux shell
Thank you for mentioning using dates "correctly" in file names. Most companies/people I've traded files with use the US format MM/DD/YYYY, which, as you know, does not sort correctly. It drives me nuts.
Great video, I would love to see more guide on the subject
It’s also wise to sometime name files with date firsts. I have my whole photography and backup with date first. I guess it depends on how you would like to search for those files. But a good naming convention is really really important!
I love when cameras save files like that. Too much random shit happens if you're going by the "date created / modified" in metadata. Like if it all gets overwritten when copied to another file system you're basically dead if that was important info.
@@JrIcify yes I agree. Or I usually cull my images etc. in Photo Mechanic Plus, and do all metadata and keywording. Very very good program for that. But, I’m not on Linux so…
I usually add some emojis to my file names to document the emotional state I was in when creating the file. Helps a lot! 😎
I know you're joking but please don't joke about that - there will be some "geniuses" that will actually think that's a good idea, do it in Linux and then when they have a problem they will just whine about "too many distros", "too much fragmentation" or "why are Linux elitists always so cruel to me?"
@@terrydaktyllus1320 you are right. I'm a linux administrator and my job is sometimes to migrate windows file servers to a linux samba environment. Therefore I know what wierd characters will be used in file names by clueless users, who don't care about computer science, sadly. I didn't come along any emojis in file names so far, but any other problematic character you can imagine.
@@MrGucky2010 I'm also lucky enough to work on Red Hat Linux servers in business telecom environments, mainly securing and hardening them but, yes, some of the stuff I see users do when I am looking through systems does make me wonder if they should be anywhere near a computer!
Chris Were had a great video a while ago called "a ramble on filename conventions". I miss Chris's videos, he really was the king of rambly tech videos.
About versioning files: I use zero-padded integer numbers with 2 digits (I never exceeded 99 versions of one file yet). Never use words like "final","new" etc. because you'll go back to fix one more thing and make one more version and these words are no longer accurate. The file with the highest number version is the latest one, and also the final one :)
or just use proper version control
I like using a shortened date stamp of 221007 instead of 20221007. If I add a time I do it like 221007-1538. It's shorter and I don't think there will be confusion with the years during my lifetime. Typically, in document folders concerned with one specific topic, I place the date stamp at the beginning of the file name to be able to sort by it since the modified time attribute does not reflect the time of creation or the time of a specific event that is related to this document that I typically place in the date stamp.
That's just a horrible idea. Were you not alive during the Y2K panic? 221007 can be read as October 22, 2007. When you get into digits that are
For Windows Users: "DIR List" is an ancient programme for Windows users that allows you to create lists of all the filenames in your system. "Simpli-File Renamer" is a programme that allows you to quickly rename 1000s of files on Windows.
Plus, thank you to your video and despite being contrary to your advice. You helped me find out that the dollar sign forces the filename to the top of the list of both Windows 10 and Google Drive.
Very good video! Thanks.
When I'm playing a long-term game like Civ or Master of Orion, my naming convention for save files is the date the game started, in the format YYMMDD. That tells me not only which game I'm loading, but how long it's been going.
this video was actually very useful 👌🏻
I've also found that another special character it's best to avoid is '; the apostrophe. It's often found in real words, so it pops up pretty often, but it's best to just remove it from the names of your own files. I had to remove it from my video files in order to set up a script that would run a video file at random (a little experiment I was doing,) because the apostrophe is another special character. I don't know if I'm describing this well, but the script basically interpreted apostrophes as the start or end of a "selection" of characters, like a file path in my case, so file names with apostrophes had to be changed.
Good idea. I don't know any (human) language where replacing the apostophe by a space or a hyphen changes a meaning, or makes it less readable.
Shows that DT normally focuses on clean, basic stuff beyond chatter, clutter.
Dereck This is a great subject.
Hey Dt! Would you consider doing a tier list bars for Wms? Like Polybar, lemonbar, Xmobar, Tint2, Dzen2, etc...
Not sure if you have messed with enough of those to make a whole video, but I wanted to try a new bar and wondered if you had recommendations.
I have a little problem with consistency, I use python mainly, so, the pep8 says for modules to be named with lowercase and recommended to use underscores if necessary, i get that using the us keyboard using - is also easier, but it seems like it wouldn't be consistent there, i don't remember trying to use - instead and I am not sure about other programing languages naming conventions
Excellent advice!
This is helpful. Thank you.
I am in the process of switching from Windows to Debian XFCE full time. In Windows I use spaces between words, commas and brackets for my file names. Will this be an issue when transferring the Windows files to Linux?
Oh. This is a fun video. :) I am generally a slob in life, but my file system on my computers are all very organized (directories/file names). My wife wishes it was the other way around.
Thanks a lot .. I do preffer underscores.
Regarding special characters in filenames: It's a good idea not to use them, but just for the record, on Linux the only character (other than null, of course) that's truly forbidden in filenames is "/", since the kernel treats it as the path separator. All the other special characters are only special to shells, where you can use quoting and escaping to handle them if necessary. Other operating systems have different rules, of course. But yeah, it's best to limit yourself when naming your own files.
So simple and sooo important.
DT, thanks for this. I am a newbie on Linux and have been using KDE Neon. The command to rename a file or lots of files to remove capital letters didn't work, perl or no perl. What am I doing wrong? A solution would be really helpful. Cheers. EDIT: realised I needed to do sudo apt install rename and ran the command. 3000+ files in an instant. Amazing!!
Is there a way to apply those rename commands too all folders and files, without entering every single one of them manually? I use Linux for like two months now, but I still don't know much. I use Linux Mint btw
5:42
I think Windows did that long time ago, probably until windows xp or 7, now if you have a file called file1 and on the same folder you download File1 it's going to rename it to file1(1), still an issue but at least it doesn't delete the other one. And it can be multiple file1 files on the system but not on the same folder.
Here's my revolutionary idea which should be implemented soon: Replace both directories and file names with tags.
Directories would then be implemented as tag filters (which also allows finding files in multiple directories, if both apply, making shortcuts unnecessary). Nested directories can be in any order and changed at will.
Files transferred between a network and a local drive would automatically go where they belong. Other people can add a tag without it disturbing your view. Anyone can find any file on a shared network drive easily because all would appear according to ones own preferences, maybe with some administrative or OS defaults.
Preselected tags would be used like classical file names, even if that means a tag can appear both in the directories/filters and in the name. The tags which are neither in the path nor preselected as name would show in file properties or such, maybe with the number of files beneath each in that view (depending on selected filters), so that relevant tags can be chosen as additional directories/filters or name tags. The name tags would have a standard order to allow names where only the order of tags is different, though there might be options to display them to a user in their preferred order and other customisations, even if that means files which differ in tag order only appear as duplicates and new versions might be saved incorrectly.
People only need to go down a path until the number of matches is manageable, whereby the top filters/tags might be defined to only show files with just that tag (outside the name tags). This also requires an automatic (and reserved) "other" tag, where all files appear to which none of the current tier of tags applies.
There might be some extra features, like ignoring or removing tags from some people if those bring more confusion than usefulness. Or adding relevant tags more or less automatically to the name so that every name is unique, at least on a drive. Which would also require prompting for additional tags or creating them from date, time, location, user or other information. For publishing (on the web, for instance), transfer and such, some tags might be added or removed automatically, as needed.
Only small letters should be allowed in the tags (and the equivalent of other languages), but people should be free to define a capitalisation for all or individual flags - or a translation, with the same mechanism.
As to translations, standard tags should always be translatable, i. e., they appear to everyone in their language of choice., with the standard language (usually English) being another option and visible on closer look, and a file name container being used which ensures there's no mix up between translated and non-translated words. Symbols for standard tags and as an option for the other tags might also help. Where double meanings and such could lead to confusion, tag translations can also contain more than one word or a description, the original or a loan word with a hover text as explanation and the likes. It should also be possible to show tags in different fonts, writing systems and so on.
Some reserved flags, like "System", would hide files from casual users and be optional to show. They may not be hidden by default in compressed files and other such containers.
Dates and times and such would always be saved in a universal time format and appear to each according to their regional settings.
People can choose a unique naming convention, where their domain, username or such is added as tags to the file name and a mechanism ensures the name does not appear twice. The system should allow names where the order of tags is the only difference, but provide a standard order for (name) tags and guidance, so that people can easily avoid files where only the order of tags is different, making it easier to display files according to ones own preferences and to find back to the original order, for instance when looking for a related or the same resource on the net or a large network drive, especially legacy systems still using directories and conventional file names.
IMO, mixture of hyphen and underscore is better for readability.
Hmm... I always used underscores for my file names. I just think they look better, and more like a proper spacer. Hyphens in standard English typically divide compound words into two more easily readable halves, so unless dealing with dates... it just feels weird to me to use them as an alternative to space. I rarely put dates in my file names because that's what timestamps are for.
There is really only one instance I can recall putting dates in file names: One directory, which I saved all of my paystubs for my job, were simply named *as* the date of the paystub, nothing else; ie: 2022-10-07. Every file in that directory used that format, and not a single file outside of that directory used it. So although that is not normally my own preferred convention, it made sense in that particular case because the files would be listed numerically in order by paystub date, and in was contained/restricted to that one directory.
Great Work thank you
Australian here, love the Dockers t-shirt, one of our Aussie Rules (AFL) teams, out of Western Australia.
BTW, I've been exclusively 'nix , started with Slackware, moved to Redhat, and now mostly Gentoo, at home since '93. I liked it because it was closer to the old CPM than DOS was. I get so totally lost in MS because none of it makes sense to me
ISO 8601 - was using it without knowing it existed! Thank you for the info!
thanks, it actually let me through so i could download it.
I usually set directory names that start with capital characters. Files with lower case. Old naming convention for user directories and files.
This is the kind of thing that makes me wish there was a filesystem that was tag-based instead of (or in addition to) hierarchical. If files could consistently have metadata tags to search for (as in not just in the file name).
You can make a simple tagging system by following a file naming convention. Use dashes to separate the title words, then as the ending part of the filename, add one or more tags each starting with an underscore. Then include the underscore in the search string to find files by tag. For example
$ find ~ -name "*_tag*"
For finding by more than one tag it would be like
$find ~ \( -name '*_tag1*' -o -name '*_tag2*' \)
A good argument to use both dashes and underscores :)
The other year I did think up that adding a simple category system (on a per directory basis) would vastly improve use of the filesystem since you would need less unnecessary directories/links; you could have all your music in one directory and all your music categories, and when a piece meets multiple categories (which in this case could even be used as simple playlists), instead of choosing only one directory to put it in or other unideal choices you could just mark it with both and then, when using, choose to view only certain categories in the directory. Technically, this would complete the filesystem's ability to represent all structures of set theory, adding the rest of categorization (specifically, overlapping) to the classification (mutually exclusive hierarchies) that filesystems already do.
i use hyphens to replace spaces and underscores to separate elements of the name:
My-File_2022-7-7_LName-FName-MName
I also think that capital letters should be used regardless of Windows seeing it at lowercased because of acronyms and names.
Hyphens or underscores? Well, words can contain hyphens, so word separators should be replaced by underscores so you can tell external filename convention characters from internal file name contents characters, naturally! Also, I obviously don't agree on the just-have-one-or-the-other rule...
Those rules apply on Linux. I can have filenames with spaces on my Windows system and it just works. The only case where this rules are applied is when I'm programming and I want the files to communicate with each other. But even then. I always put class files in Pascal case.
Btw in Windows you can enable case-sensitive mode. NTFS even supports changing the mode for individual directories.
And you can make ext4 case-insensitive, but why would you?
@@helloimatapir for NTFS it can useful for Linux stuff. Creating directories via WSL automatically make them case-sensitive.
As for case-insensitive ext4, yeah, its hard to find a use case for it.
I prefer to put dates at the front of the file name, that way when you sort files you can sort them in date order easily :)
how would you guys set name descriptions for music samples? the "fields" must be crazily long!!!
Excellent. I had a lot of files from my Mac with **gasp** spaces in them. Now I don't! BOOM! Thanks!
How do I use perl-rename recursively on all sub-dirs? Thanks!
While it's idealistic to have a naming convention, as long as you have some sort of naming system that's the main thing.
I read a great article years ago on how to setup a file structure and naming conventions. And basically it all ended back to having your main directory structure similar to Windows or Linux (Documents, Photos etc).
However my first directory of a drive is Files - this way no program has root access to the drive (regardless of OS) and sharing is done off the directory (which works well for backup software and sharing). The one directory I also add is a _Settings where I can put app configs, settings, bookmarks, virtual machines etc. It's out of the way but there if I need it. And easy to port over between OS. And a Work directory for my work stuff just because I'm accessing it so regularly.
But on the naming conventions from the article, it was start with a date if needed, project where it belongs and a description of some sort. But having the directory structure in place helps a lot if you've got a heap of stored files from years of hoarding and haven't got around to naming them correctly yet.
Another good reason for getting rid of spaces in file names is exactly for the reasons you stated DT in that they might end up on the web. So then there's ascii equivalent codes placed in the url instead of space which can muck things up..
As a wedding photographer, many many moons ago, descriptive file names was next to impossible especially if you just shot 1800 photos for a wedding and a reception. So renaming 1800 photos just isn't practical. Now, naming the folder you put these photos into is important. Descriptive folders for massive amounts of photos is a better idea than renaming every photo. Even if you only give the person 300-400 photos out of that 1800, that's still a lot of files to rename. What I did was I would create the folder (Jan & Jeans Wedding 9-8-2022), I'd copy the pictures into that folder, then the one's I'd keep would go into a sub folder under Jan & Jeans Wedding 9-8-2022 called /Keepers or something like that. That way, I knew that /Keepers had the pictures in it I wanted to give them. Also with massive amounts of files in one folder, what I would do is I would have a root folder named Photos. This is where ALL of my photos went... Wedding or not. So lets say I had a wedding last month as well on September 5th. Well, in my Photos folder, I have a folder for the year, then inside that folder I will have all 12 months, then under that folder, I would have the subfolders for each time I took photos. That would be where my naming convention starts and pretty much ends shortly after is with folders. So my September 5th wedding would be under Photos/DigitalCamera/2022/September/Bob & Bobbie/DCIM. DCIM is the name on the memory stick when you pull it out of the camera. All of the RAW files are in that folder. So DCIM is where IMG_0001.CR2, IMG_0002.CR2... would be. Then I would make a folder called Keepers under Bob & Bobbie and put the best photos in jpg form in that folder. I'd do the same thing for Jan & Jean. So under /Photos/DigitalCamera/2022/October/Jan & Jean would be their DCIM folder. So, I think when you're dealing with MASSIVE amounts of files at one time, using a folder naming convention instead is key!
It's been a while but I am pretty sure I put the wedding date as part of the name with the bride and groom. So under the October folder it would be /Jan & Jean 9-8 or /9-8 Jan & Jean I think I used the second type of formatting. Also, because I'd already be under the 2022 folder there is no need for 9-8-2022. 9-8 would suffice. So years later (and this happened recently) if a bride from July 7 2001 wanted all of the pictures of her father because he recently passed away I could easily find July 7 2001 and find her all of the photos I took that had her dad in them. As a side note, I did not charge her for that. I just gave them to her. She offered money but as humble as I am, I did not take it. Out of respect for the family. Even though I'm not shooting weddings anymore, if I were, that would be a huge plus for my business. a) because I still had photos from 21 years ago and b) I wasn't a dick about giving her 20-25 photos for free. I figured she already paid for them 21 years ago. Right?
omg, what an essential video.
From the comments section this seems to be about a hyphen vs underscore battle. Now to watch the video!
Thank you!
I consider "hyphen" as a common character just like the letters. The usage of hyphens in dates strongly favors the usage of underscores as spaces, not the opposite (in my opinion). For example, I find the name 2022-10-22_10_things_to_log must clearer than 2022-10-22-10-things-to-log
I do it with the date and name separated by underscore: 2022-10-22_things-to-log which makes it easy to read (actually I don't even put dashes in the date so mine are like: 20221022_things-to-log).
@@Lea_D. this sounds ok
I've used spaces and mixed upper/lower case in my work file names for decades (most are address based) and I know that's a no-no
In the very first perl-rename case: What would happen if there was a file 'test' and a file 'TEST'? Would 'TEST' be converted to 'test' and overwrite the original 'test'? Or would there be an error?
All capital letters become lowercase letters...so TEST will be renamed to test.
@@DistroTube Yes, but what happens if there already is a file named 'test' in lowercase in the folder at the moment the command is executed?
@@goldibollocks Try it and find out.
This is why filling out metadata in the properties is so important.
i used to do both, as in _ for separating words and - for edge cases and for connected words, something like "project-name_4x3_1080p_v3-2_09-07-22_17-33" because I liked the added layer of information i could transmit. for example old-cars_v3 would be different from old_cars_v3.
i switched to - only, it looks much better and that extra distinction is not useful often enough to employ
youtube is crazy, there is literally a video about anything. Which is cool.
*underscore > hyphen* any day
That is because: double-clicking a hyphenated name in ALL GUI editors and everywhere in general will not select the entire name but just till it hits a hyphen.
Underscores on the other hand will ALWAYS be selected as *one*.
And dates should use dots as separator, only amercooms do it differently.
And what about folder structure? It's an eternal problem how much of the information (categories!) about a file you would include in its name, and what you can leave to the folder structure. For example, I'm learning two languages, Czech and French. I might have verb conjugation tables named the same in two different folders, one Czech and one French. Only the location of that file tells me which language the conjugation table is in - once I move the file, that information is lost. Put *all* the information into the filename? Then you might as well have everything in one big folder, no subfoloders, no tree structure, right?
i use periods to separate words... i'm sure there's some reason why you shouldn't.. but looks good to me, easy to read, doesn't make the text look too long and drawn out
hasn't caused me any problems yet
So what do you do with folders?
Mandatory video for the average Joe.
I just use a sidecar file for meta data so I don't pollute file names with dates. Also xattrs already exist on most popular file systems, so we might as well make use of them already ;-)
And, while I don't use spaces in my file names, I do use spaces in my directories because that's who I am. Also I always quoting every file name in your commands or use the autocomplete feature in bash which escapes spaces and parentheses. Yes I use them.
Also, if you're a datahoarder, it's might not a good idea to correct file names in stuff you hoard, especially for torrents. If a torrent has multiple files, I just download it in a separate directory with the directory made by the torrent is inside it. It's much cleaner this way, at least for me.
rename and perl-rename look useful, wish i'd have known beforehand before i wrote my own python script to remove things
i use upper case for first name or to seperate words like StepUp
Good video.
the uppercase and lowercase differentiation is logical as in Linux. ignoring uppercase is pathetic on the part of an OS
Your point about windows not differentiating by case actually just means you should be consistent with case, not that you should avoid caps. Camelcase instead of spaces is great. I use underscores to seperate fields (name, title, date etc.). Dates can be just a string of 8 digits, or it can be hyphenated if you want. The hyphens instead of underscores in the date isn’t inconsistent, it marks it clearly as a date and not seperate fields. Hyphens make it clear that it is a date and not an employee number or a student number, as well as helping denote format as yyyy-mm-dd and not dd-mm-yyyy
I have a different way to rename my files so not everything is uniform or the same format but I always follow my own such as: [Game or Title name] *Specific category* (1) then other stuffs so yeah this proves helpful and if I wanna organise this is what I use.
For a few years I was using katakana for file names.
Thanks for the video! Now I need to start renaming my years and years of files, most of which were made on Windows which allows you to easily not do any of this. Gonna take a while!
A more convenient way to include timestamps in different formats anywhere, not just in the shell, is a global text expander like Espanso.
If only the day is relevant, I use a format like "2022-10-09", otherwise the basic format down to the second like "20221009t103101z" (UTC).
Why not use dot for the seperator?
Absolutely agree that need to have some reference to the content of the file in the name! I find filenames with underscores easier to read, but easier selection, clearly a bonus. I use NameThatFile in a windows environment to speed up file naming. Typically would be "2023-02-16_Receipt_SmithJohn_BuzzCutsHair"
Hi dt do you want to take a look at my material you xmonad configuration??
I prefer hyphens for software development purposes, but for other projects such as making video and audio, I prefer spaces and hyphens. 👍🏻
ISO dates sorts properly with ls or in file manager with by name sorting
Fact that will ruin your day: Linux (or at least ext2-4) allows any set of bytes in a file name except the null byte and /. This means your filenames can contain new lines, carriage return, ASCII End-of-Transmission character, ASCII bell, and just about anything else you can think of. Enjoy
You can even name files with Arabic characters. It's actually a really cool feature, if you ask me.
I still MUST use both Windows & Linux. I prefer _, in most cases, for historical reasons, where working with traditional DOS was common.
I have specific DOs and DONTs that work for me. Great to see what works for others though. I should probably document the full thing, except for im more focused on everybodys rules, not my own. There are only a few rules for everybody, as thats what works for me.
I have to watch an 18 minute video with ads bethore naming a file why can't life be simple
I generally don't do spaces next word starts with a capital letter.
If you use some file generated multiple times day after day using timestamp is a good idea. But I'm not sure about once time created file, becouse you can use ctime, mtime or atime values from filesystem.