commandliners

You’ve got a bunch of files you want to reorder (that is rename so that they appear in a specific order) but do not want to really rename them (their original names are relevant). You may want to create a set of links to each of them with the appropriate ’001′, ’002′ term before. Here is a script for doing exactly this.
Use as follows (if named ‘mapnames.sh’):

$ mapnames.sh digits file1 [file2 file3 ...]

will use digits digits for the leading numeral (adding '0' before) and will link the files in the given order.
Here is the code:

#!/bin/sh
length=$1
shift
count=1
for name in $@
do
    zeroes=`printf "%0${length}d" $count`
    if [ -e "$zeroes$count.$name" ] ; then
        echo "$zeroes$count.$name exists, left unnamed."
    else
        ln -s "$name" "$zeroes$count.$name"
    fi
    i=$(($i+1));
done

This question came up on the UNIX bboard at sdf. Use with caution. Rafacas did a rather important code optimization...