How do I rename a lot of files from an excel worksheet?

Question

Hello all!
I have 2k+ files in a folder named sequentially from 0001.wav to 24xx.wav.
I have their contents referenced in an .xls.
This is a library made for Windows when it didn't accept very long names, so you couldn't just name the file accordingly.
So what I want to do is to rename these files taking the name from my excel sheet and pasting it on the file. To do that one by one is really too much.... Can anyone think of an automated (or semi-automated) way of doing this?
Thanks!!!

Answer 1

Hi again,
So I have a couple of questions, if you don't mind:
Of course not!
To hopefully make things more understandable, here's the script again with some line numbers I can refer to:
1 for details in `cat myspreadsheetdetails.csv`
2 do
3 OLD_NAME=`echo $details | cut -f1 -d,`
4 NEW_NAME=`echo $details | cut -f2 -d,`
5
6 echo "Renaming $OLD_NAME to $NEW_NAME"
7 mv $OLD_NAME $NEW_NAME
8 done
Firstly, some assumptions I've made.
1. The excel spreadsheet has 2 columns. Column A is the current name of the wav file, column B is the new name you want the wav file to have.
2. Both name in columns A and B have the .wav extension specified
3. None of the names have a space character in them. Eg. 'A cool song.wav'
4. The script is being run from the folder containing the files to be renamed.
Now, back to your questions:
1)where in the script am I telling in wich directory the files are?
The first thing we'd need to do in the Terminal, is change the working directory to where the wav files are located. The simplest way to do this is type 'cd ' (i.e. the cd followed by the space character) and then drag and drop the folder containing the wav files onto the Terminal window. That will populate the path and you can then press return to change to that directory.
Line #1 specifies the file name that details the old and new names. Let's assume you save the excel spreadsheet as a csv file and create the file on your Desktop as being called songs.csv. In this case, line #1 would become:
for details in `cat ~/Desktop/songs.csv`
(The ~ is a shortcut that means your home folder.)
2)will this script rename all the files automatically? I mean, when it finds 001.wav it will rename it to mynewtitle.wav and when it finds 004.wav it will rename it to mynewtitle4.wav? even if they are not sequential? even if not all the the files in the CSV are present in the directory, or viceversa?
The script currently does not do anything more complex than follow what is present in the spreadsheet. So for example, if you have the following data:
<pre style="font-family:'Courier New';">
Column A | Column B
0001.wav | MyNewTitle.wav
0002.wav | SomeOtherTitle.wav
2304.wav | Test123.wav
0003.wav | GreatSong.wav
</pre>
it will rename, 0001.wav to MyNewTitle.wav, 0002.wav to SomeOtherTitle.wav, 2034.wav to Test123.wav and so on. The names themselves are irrelevant.
If that's not what you want, can you give me a few examples?
3)what do you mean by testing? how can I test the script without actually renaming the files?
The only command that actually 'does' anything is line #7. When copying the commands in the Terminal if you skip that one line, then when you run it, the echo statement on line #6 will just print to the screen what it would do, without actually doing anything.
If you can post a sample of the spreadsheet that should help me confirm I'm not going to trash your files
If none of that made sense, just yell and I'll try to rephrase.