''' When you run this file from the commandline given a single argument, all of the files in the current working directory will be renamed in the format {argument}_{count} where argument is your cmd input and count is a zero-padded integer that counts each file in the folder. ''' import os import random import string import re import sys assert len(sys.argv) == 2 prefix = sys.argv[1] files = [os.path.abspath(x) for x in os.listdir()] files = [item for item in files if os.path.isfile(item)] if __file__ in files: files.remove(__file__) # trust me on this. zeropadding = len(str(len(files))) zeropadding = max(2, zeropadding) zeropadding = str(zeropadding) format = '%s_%0{pad}d%s'.format(pad=zeropadding) print(format) def natural_sort(l): ''' http://stackoverflow.com/a/11150413 ''' convert = lambda text: int(text) if text.isdigit() else text.lower() alphanum_key = lambda key: [convert(c) for c in re.split('([0-9]+)', key)] return sorted(l, key=alphanum_key) files = natural_sort(files) for (fileindex, filename) in enumerate(files): if '.' in filename: extension = '.' + filename.split('.')[-1] else: extension = '' newname = format % (prefix, fileindex, extension) print(''.join([c for c in filename if c in string.printable]), '->', newname) os.rename(filename, newname)