Consolidate

A simple rust tool for moving all files from directories and subdirectories down to a base directory via globbing.

The benefits

1. Handles duplicate file renaming for you.

2. You can define the renaming pattern you desire using simple: {name}, {n} and {ext} variables for the --duplicate-format flag.

3. Verbose logging for the whole process as well as the results.

4. Convenient to use - Instead of writing a sequence of shell commands - you can use one.

5. A dry run mode to test what will happen before committing to the changes.

Usage

Consolidating a tree with files is somewhat of a common task. Say - you've used my recordings-mover and now you want to revert the changes from moving the recordings from a flat structure to a chronological structure of directories back to a flat structure again. With consolidate you can do this by just running:

./consolidate <Path to year directory>/**/*

[!IMPORTANT] Please make sure you're fully aware of the consequences of consolidating directories as running this script with the input as: /**/* or C:\**\* with sudo/administrator permission for example would cause permanent (and incredibly tedious to recover) damage to your system.

Implications

Due to the limitations of glob, this program only works with local paths or mounted network paths, such as:

• UNC shares on Windows;
• Network-mounted filesystems (NFS, CIFS/SMB, SSHFS, etc.) on Linux.

Remote paths using protocols like sftp://, http://, or ftp:// are not supported.