Utility to rename files as they are extracted from a RAR archive

June 16, 2014 3:48 AM

I have many data files named in a particular format. The files are either ZIP or RAR archives, and contain several sub-data files each in different formats (with a different extension; this is Windows). I need a utility to extract the contents and simultaneously rename each sub-data file to the name of its parent archive AND preserve the sub-data files' extensions. Anyone know of such a utility? Winrar, 7zip don't do this, and I've had no luck searching around.
posted by flutable to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Can you show us an example of what the contents of one of these rar files looks like, and what you want the result to be?
posted by devnull at 3:50 AM on June 16, 2014

Response by poster: The names are similar to:

satellite_date_experiment_someID.rar

the contents of the RAR file are similar to:

observation1.txt
obs2.csv
observed_data_3.asc

...and possibly others.

I just want everything in one folder with no archives!

....I can feel some scripting coming on, but just wondered if there's already a pre-canned solution.
posted by flutable at 4:00 AM on June 16, 2014

Best answer: So from the file satellite_date_experiment_someID.rar you want:

observation1.txt -> satellite_date_experiment_someID.txt
obs2.csv -> satellite_date_experiment_someID.csv
observed_data_3.asc -> satellite_date_experiment_someID.asc

Is this right?

This wouldn't take long to do in bash (Linux), I don't know of a pre-canned solution for Windows, sorry.
posted by devnull at 4:07 AM on June 16, 2014

You can do this with powershell - this page has an example of unraring all files in a folder.

In your case you would have to unpack the files to a temporary folder, unrar (or unzip) the files, then traverse through the files in the temporary folder (this would be another foreach inside the foreach in the link above), then rename each of them before moving them all to the target folder.
posted by Baron Humbert von Gikkingen at 6:10 AM on June 16, 2014

DropIt looks like you could setup with a monitored folder to do this. Here's the wiki.

(Originally came to mention these two utilities, which I'll put here for completeness, but I think DropIt will do what you need.)
-Rename Master is a free bulk-renamer, but it won't do the extraction.
-Total Commander (shareware, 1 month trial) can extract, and has a configurable 'Bulk Rename Tool', but I don't think you can tell it to do both in order.
posted by quinndexter at 6:54 AM on June 16, 2014

Paste the following into extract-all.cmd:

set work=%temp%\%random%%random%%random%%random%
mkdir "%work%" || goto :eof

for %%A in (*.zip *.rar) do (
	"%ProgramFiles%\7-Zip\7z.exe" e -o"%work%" "%%~A"
	for %%F in ("%work%\*") do move "%%~F" "%%~nA%%~xF"
)

rmdir "%work%"

Install 7-Zip. Put extract-all.cmd in a folder along with copies of all the compressed files you want to extract, and double-click it.
posted by flabdablet at 7:32 AM on June 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Explanation:

%temp% is a preset environment variable that identifies your Windows temporary folder. %random% is a special environment variable that expands to a new random number between 0 and 32727 each time. So set work=%temp%\%random%%random%%random%%random% means that %work% will expand to the name of a subfolder of your Windows temporary folder that has an extremely high chance of not already existing.

mkdir "%work%" attempts to create that folder, and || goto :eof aborts the script if that attempt fails (which it will do if another folder or file with that name does happen to exist). So if the mkdir succeeds, we now have a guaranteed-empty work folder.

for %%A in (*.zip *.rar) do (
	stuff
)

does stuff repeatedly, once for each file in the current folder whose name matches anything.zip or anything.rar; between the parentheses, %%A will expand to the name of each such file in turn.

"%ProgramFiles%\7-Zip\7z.exe" e -o"%work%" "%%~A" tells 7-Zip to extract every file from the compressed archive %%A into the output folder "%work%" (the empty one we just made earlier). The e subcommand tells 7-Zip to stick all the extracted files straight into the output folder, ignoring any internal folder hierarchy the compressed archive might have. Using "%%~A" instead of the bare %%A guarantees that the compressed archive's own expanded filename will be wrapped in one set of quotes, just in case its name includes spaces.

for %%F in ("%work%\*") do stuff does stuff repeatedly, once for each file in the %work% folder. Since that folder is now occupied exclusively by whatever got extracted from the compressed archive, it will do stuff once for each extracted file, making %%F expand to the file's full pathname (because %work% is a full pathname).

move "%%~F" "%%~nA%%~xF" moves the file %%F out of the work folder and into the current folder, with a name consisting of the current archive file's name without its extension (this is what %%~nA expands to) followed by the extracted file's existing extension (which is what %%~xF expands to).

Because the for %%F command repeats that move for every single file in the work folder, the work folder ends up empty again after that for is complete, ready to receive the extracted files from the next go around the for %%A loop.

Finally, rmdir "%work%" gets rid of the now-empty work folder.
posted by flabdablet at 8:06 AM on June 16, 2014

For comparison purposes, the same thing in bash:

if work=$(mktemp -d)
then
	for archive in *.zip *.rar
	do
		7z e -o"$work" "$archive"
		for file in "$work/"*
		do
			mv "$file" "${archive%.*}.${file##*.}"
		done
	done
	rmdir "$work"
fi

Main difference with the bash version is that just looking at it I'm quite confident that it will work, even without testing; getting all the quoting and special-case syntax right in a cmd script requires lots of testing (which I've done, by the way - the cmd script above does work).
posted by flabdablet at 8:26 AM on June 16, 2014

Just had a look at DropIt, and as a crusty old greybeard it gave me a bit of a giggle. Those crazy kids have gone to a huge amount of trouble to create an even less useful scripting language than cmd, and with a very bizarre script editor to boot. I fail to see how cmd or powershell or vbs are any harder to learn than their rules-and-actions thing for the kinds of task that DropIt looks useful for, and time spent doing so opens up many more possibilities than DropIt offers.

If you write a cmd script (or a js script or vbs script or indeed any program at all), and drag and drop any file or folder onto your script's launch icon (be that the icon for the actual script, or for a shortcut to that script) then Windows will pass the pathnames of the items you dragged and dropped as script arguments.

So if you want the ability to expand new archive files as you acquire them, as well as the ability to batch-process a bunch of existing archives, modify expand-all.cmd as follows:

set work=%temp%\%random%-%random%-%random%-%random%
mkdir "%work%" || goto :eof

set archives=%*
if not defined archives set archives=*.zip *.rar

for %%A in (%archives%) do (
	"%ProgramFiles%\7-Zip\7z.exe" e -o"%work%" "%%~A"
	for %%F in ("%work%\*") do move "%%~F" "%%~nA%%~xF"
)

rmdir "%work%"

%* expands to all the script's arguments, so %archives% will expand to the names of all the files you drop onto the script, or to *.zip *.rar if you don't drop any. So if you just double-click expand-all.cmd's icon, it will work exactly as it did before and expand all the zip and rar files in the current folder. If you drag an archive file (or a multi-selected group of archive files) and drop onto expand-all.cmd's icon, it will expand those into the current folder instead.

If you're using expand-all.cmd directly, the current folder will be the one that expand-all.cmd itself is in. If you're using it via a shortcut, you can make the current folder anything you like by setting the "Start in" item in the shortcut's properties.
posted by flabdablet at 9:44 PM on June 16, 2014

Also for comparison, a bash script with the same capability:

if work=$(mktemp -d)
then
	test -n "$1" && set -- *.zip *.rar
	for archive
	do
		7z e -o"$work" "$archive"
		for file in "$work/"*
		do
			mv "$file" "${archive%.*}.${file##*.}"
		done
	done
	rmdir "$work"
fi

posted by flabdablet at 9:55 PM on June 16, 2014