Directory Opus Tip of the Week

Need a means of "really" deleting a file? No need to buy a separate "Secure Delete" package - Dopus has it built in! Department of Defense level (and beyond) file deletion is available. Just MIDDLE CLICK the delete icon:



You can set the number of passes (I believe DOD is 6 passes) in the preferences:



One more program you don't have to buy - thanks to Directory Opus!

Opus has a great tool for viewing, editing and converting images.

See it in action now!

Using Favorites for folders may seem pretty straight forward, but with this video, we're going to show you how to MAXIMIZE using it.

http://monroeworld.com/OpusVideo/favorites/

I’m almost done preparing courseware for my Directory Opus class and had to do some research on file renaming. Since I haven’t given you guys a tip in awhile (did you miss me??  ) I figured I’d pass this along.

While its really easy to do simplistic mass renames in Directory Opus, sometimes you need something a little more … shall we say … industrial?

Consider the pictures you dump from your digital camera:

IMG0001.JPG
IMG0002.JPG
IMG0003.JPG
…

Using some simple wildcards in Dopus’ RENAME tool, we can easily make these filenames a little more meaningful.


All fine and well. But what if you have filenames that cannot use SIMPLE pattern matching (like the *). What about these?

101. Beach Boys.mp3
102. Chicago.mp3
123. Dogma.mp3
… and so on

Yes, these is an ACTUAL scenario I ran into – someone wanted their pictures ordered a certain way, so they put NUMBERS in front of the images to make them sort in the order they wanted them.

These cannot be renamed with simple pattern matching. You want to REMOVE the first 4 characters, but you want the REST of the filename … can we do that in Dopus? You bet – using Regular Expressions (or RegEx for short).

I’m not going to go into the entire RegEx scripting language right now (see http://www.regular-expressions.info/ for more info), but Dopus can indeed handle a job like this.

We change to Regular Expressions on the right, then in the Old Filename we use: (….)(.+)

Simply put, the periods match ANY CHARACTER. So it takes the first 4 characters and makes it parameter #1 (keep reading) and then it looks for any text AFTER that (.+ = any number of any characters) and puts that in parameter #2.

In the NEW NAME, we just wanted anything BUT the first four characters … so, by using \2 (or parameter #2) for the new name, we get everything except the first 4 characters.
Using RegEx, you can perform almost ANY complicated rename you can imagine!

Ever wanted to select a subset of files from a HUGE folder filled with stuff? Perhaps you want to select just the .WAV files out of a directory (*.wav). Or just the .ASP files (*.asp). Maybe just a certain series of images from your digital camera picture folder (IMG3*.JPG).

Maybe you want to select everything EXCEPT a certain wildcard ...

With Dopus, its easy.

- Select the lister to perform the operation.
- Hit the SELECT WILDCARD icon on the toolbar
- Type in your wildcard (for example):
*.mp3 (gets all files with mp3 extension)
c*.* (gets all files starting with c)
*.htm* (gets all .HTM and .HTML files)
???300.jpg (gets img300.jpg, pkg300.jpg, sim300.jpg, etc)

The files you request will be selected. Of course, if you do this sort of selection a lot, you can program it into a button using the following code for the function:

Select PATTERN <wildcard pattern>

For example:

Select PATTERN c*.*
Select PATTERN *.php

... and so on. Use this with INVERT selection to EXCLUDE files from your selection. USEFUL if you are using Visual Source safe on a project and want to EXCLUDE the .SCC files from your replication from a dev server to a prod server. Make a button that does this:

Select PATTERN *.scc
Select INVERT

Now you get everything EXCEPT the .SCC files selected.

Powerful stuff.