Bulk renaming PDFs to their Title names from PDF Metadata

Recently, i realized that I have amassed a huge number of e-books over the years and have ended up dumping them within an e-books directory on my laptop. The problem that I now faced was identifying one book from the other because a lot of them had random filenames based upon where I had downloaded them from.

So I now had a couple of requirements:

1. An automated way of renaming all of these e-books to their actual titles.
2. Removing all duplicate files.

After a little bit of looking around and experimenting around I finally got a Python based solution by Joseph Monaco to my problem. I then forked the orginal repo and added a couple of scripts to it to do my bidding. Now all that I need to do to auto organize all my e-books was this:-

1. git clone https://github.com/sayak-sarkar/pdf-title-rename
2. export PYTHONPATH=${PYTHONPATH}:$(pwd)/xmp.py
3. python pdf-title-rename/pdf-title-rename.py <PATH to my ebooks directory>/*
4. ./remove_duplicate.sh

And voila, all of my e-books were now auto renamed to their titles! 🙂

Come to think about it, I can work on repository a bit more to turn it into a full blown package, but then again, I’m feeling a bit lazy now that my goal’s served! Feel free to send me a Pull Request on GitHub if any of you want to automate it further! 😉

Using Vim to generate HTML output of code

This is an interesting bit that I learnt about from an email in a mailing list by James Pryor.

To generate html output for code within a shell script you can use:

vim myscript.sh '+syntax on' '+ set nu' '+set background=light' +TOhtml '+w myscript.html' '+qall!'

If you don’t want numbers and need a dark background you can use:

vim myscript.sh '+syntax on' '+ set nonu' '+set background=dark' +TOhtml '+w myscript.html' '+qall!'