Comic Strips

You explaining that you would only do a numerical sort when the basename of the filename is entirely a number, as if your logical sense translates into a good user experience, is exactly why companies have to hire UX designers instead of just programmers.

If you have Windows 10, I suggest that you play around with filenames with numbers in file explorer and see how they're sorted. Your intuition does not match the average user's expectations in this circumstance.

I’m assuming that normalizing digits is similar to normalizing audio? Where you take the numbers and assigning them all a blanket set of instructions?

Normalization in mixing audio essentially takes a track and adjusts the volume of the track’s peaks to keep them from clipping the volume threshold.

Is it like this?

Wow. Reply guy party.

Me? Not at all. Unless you meant the comic strip thing, then yeah. I suppose I could see that.

Being bad at a lot of things doesn’t bother me a bit. I’m good at other things. And some of those things, I’m even great at!

As a “normie” I’d never assume to understand even the most basic of programming. My head hurts to even try and come up with a joke involving the subject.

Ahh. Makes sense that it can be automated. Same as with audio engineering. Though I like to normalize by hand sometimes as automated normalization tends to make a track sound lifeless and dead.

A Perl program to convert the number of digits in the first numeric field that appears in a list of filenames.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# numberit.pl
# Converts between number formats (number of leading zeros) in numbers in title names
# Usage: <number of digits> filelist

$digits = shift (@ARGV);

if ($digits > -1)
{
    foreach $oldName (@ARGV)
    {
        $newName = $digitValue = $oldName;

        if ($digitValue =~ m/\//) {
          $digitValue =~ m/^(.*\/[^0-9\/]*)([0-9]+)([^\/]*)$/;
          $prefix = $1;
          $postfix = $3;
          if (!defined($prefix)) {
            $prefix = "";
          }

          $digitFormatted = sprintf("%0${digits}d", $2);

        } else {
          $digitValue =~ m/^([^0-9]*)([0-9]+)([^\/]*)$/;
          $prefix = $1;
          $postfix = $3;
          if (!defined($prefix)) {
            $prefix = "";
          }

          $digitFormatted = sprintf("%0${digits}d", $2);


        }

        if ($digitValue) {
          $newName = $prefix . $digitFormatted . $postfix;
          rename($oldName, $newName);
        }
      }
}

Looks something like:

$ touch a1.mp3
$ touch a2.mp3
$ numberit.pl 3 *
$ ls
a001.mp3  a002.mp3
$ numberit.pl 2 *
$ ls
a01.mp3  a02.mp3
$