Quickly Fix Ill Formed File Names with Name Munger

Less than two weeks after we published this review of Name Munger 1.4, Sonoma Graphics released version 1.5, which made the program far more user friendly and made the Mac version a universal binary. Please see Name Munger 1.5 Makes Renaming Files Even Easier to learn about the many improvements.

Posting files on the Internet can pose problems: Sometimes file names need to be cleaned up (or "munged") to work correctly on a server.

For instance, way back in the early years of Low End Mac, I didn't know that you shouldn't include "&" in a file or directory name. When we launched a new column called "Back & Forth", I put it in a folder called "back&forth". Problem is, "&" is a special symbol that automatically converts to "&" - so links to files inside that folder failed.

I ended up renaming the directory "backnforth", fixed all of my internal links, and hoped other sites that might have linked would catch the change.

Other problems I've run into over the years involve case and spaces.

Case

Some servers and operating systems are case sensitive; some are not. Mac OS X is kind of in the middle; by default, "Folder" and "folder" are the same thing to the OS.

Early on, I discovered that if files on our website included any uppercase characters, links to them wouldn't work. Rather than worry about that as we moved from host to host over the years, I made the decision to eliminate the problem by making all directory and file names lowercase.

Back then, it meant manually renaming each file (mostly images). Later on, I skirted around the issue of having to type in characters by copying the file name, pasting it into TextSoap, converting to lowercase, copying, and then pasting onto the file.

It was better than typing, but it was tedious. Surely there had to be a better way!

Space

Another problem you'll run into on a lot of servers is spaces in file names or directory names being converted to "%20", since the space is an illegal character in a URL. Again, my only recourse was to rename the files and folders by deleting the space or replacing it with a hyphen or underscore.

One. At. A. Time.

Surely there had to be a better way!

Name Munger

Enter Name Munger 1.4 (pronounced "name munjer"), a powerful, easy-to-use program for renaming groups of files in Mac OS X 10.1 and later, Mac OS 9.1-9.2.2, and Windows 98-XP.

The easiest way to use Name Munger is to put it in your Dock and drag the files you need to rename to its icon. Name Munger will launch and give you several different tools for renaming files: replace characters, add a prefix or suffix, remove characters, strip characters, change case, and number files. And it lets you preview the changes before you commit to them.

Replace

The biggest problems I run into are spaces and capital letters. The Replace tab lets me choose what character(s) I want to replace, what I want to replace them with, and whether to replace only the first occurrence, the last occurrence, or every occurrence.

It's a simple thing to type a space into the first box, a hyphen into the second, select "Replace Every Occurrence", and click the Replace button. The image below shows how one group of files could be renamed:

Change Case

The other problem, even more common, is having uppercase characters in a file name. This shows up primarily with images sent with press releases or copied from other websites for use with a review or news roundup, and I've also run into it with stuffed software files. Names may be all caps, have caps only in the file extension, or have uppercase and lowercase characters mixed together.

Name Munger gives you four options for changing the file name (the part before the extension): no change, all lower case, all upper case, and title caps (first letter capped, rest lowercase). It also let you change file extensions to all lower case or all caps - or leave them alone.

The default is title caps with lowercase extensions, so I have to set Change File Name to "all lower case", as in the image below.

Pros and Cons

First and foremost, this is the only Mac tool I've found that does this kind of file renaming without going to the Terminal. It works well, and it works quickly. It saves me enough time every week to justify the $10 price.

That said, there is room for improvement.

For instance, Replace defaults to Replace First Occurrence and Change Case defaults to Title Case for the file name. Every time I use Name Munger, I want to replace every occurrence and change everything to lower case. There is no option to change the default behavior.

I'd love to see Name Munger add preferences, a feature of most Mac software that's grayed out in the File menu. It would be much more convenient to set my preferences to "Replace Every Occurrence" and set file name to all lower case by default.

A second improvement that would make Name Munger substantially more powerful would be the ability to remember and apply sets of changes. With the current version, you have to Replace and Change Case separately. It would be nice to be able to do both at once - and to have Name Munger save a set of changes such as change every space to a hyphen, every "&" with an "n", and all caps to lowercase.

Name Munger does what it does flawlessly and quickly. If you have to do bulk file renaming, it's the only OS X app I know of that does it, and $10 is a very reasonable price considering the time it can save you.

Yes, there is room for improvement - ways to make Name Munger an even more efficient tool - but even without preferences or the ability to change several things at once, it's a very useful tool. With a few improvements, it would be perfect. 

Link: Name Munger