• Handling time-stamps and date-stamps in file names
• Related tools and workflows

Handling time-stamps and date-stamps in file names

Per default, date2name gets the modification time of matching files and directories and adds a datestamp in standard ISO 8601+ format YYYY-MM-DD (http://datestamp.org/index.shtml) at the beginning of the file- or directoryname.

If an existing timestamp is found, its style will be converted to the selected ISO datestamp format but the numbers stays the same. Executed with an examplefilename "file" this results e.g. in "2008-12-31_file".

Note: Other that defined in ISO 8601+ the delimiter between hours, minutes, and seconds is not a colon but a dot. Colons are causing several problems on different file systems and are there fore replaced with the (older) DIN 5008 version with dots.

Usage:
         date2name [options] file ...

Run "date2name –help" for usage hints

Options:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  -d, --directories  modify only directory names
  -f, --files        modify only file names
  -C, --compact      use compact datestamp             (YYYYMMDD)
  -M, --month        use datestamp with year and month (YYYY-MM)
  -w, --withtime     use datestamp including seconds   (YYYY-MM-DDThh.mm.ss)
  -m, --mtime        take modification time for datestamp [default]
  -c, --ctime        take creation time for datestamp
  -q, --quiet        do not output anything but just errors on console
  -v, --verbose      enable verbose mode
  --nocorrections    do not convert existing datestamps to new format
  -s, --dryrun       enable dryrun mode: just simulate what would happen, do
                     not modify files or directories
  --version          display version and exit

Related tools and workflows

This tool is part of a tool-set which I use to manage my digital files such as photographs. My work-flows are described in this blog posting you might like to read.

In short:

For tagging, please refer to filetag and its documentation.

See date2name for easily adding ISO time-stamps or date-stamps to files.

For easily naming and tagging files within file browsers that allow integration of external tools, see appendfilename (once more) and filetag.

Moving to the archive folders is done using move2archive.

Having tagged photographs gives you many advantages. For example, I automatically choose my desktop background image according to the current season.

Files containing an ISO time/date-stamp gets indexed by the filename-module of Memacs.