rename randomly files on a USB device

Question

I would like to rename all of my files of my USB device randomly. Indeed, in my car, my tuner has not the random function.

I think I can do it with PHP ... but I'm pretty sure it is possible to do something shorter in shell script, right?

An idea?

Answer 1

Assuming that you are running Linux, that you want to randomly order all files in the current directory and that no file name contains a newline:

printf '%s\n' * | shuf | nl -n rz -s - |
while IFS= read -r name; do
  mv -- "${name#*-}" "$name"
done

The printf command prints the file names, one per line. shuf applies a random permutation to the input lines. nl adds prefixes like 000001-, 000002-, etc. to each line. The while loop iterates over all the lines. The mv command renames foo.mp3 to 000001-foo.mp3, etc.

Answer 2

You can add a random number of equal width as prefix, that's what I'm doing to randomize my audio files:

for i in *; do mv "$i" "$(seq -w 0 999 | shuf -n 1)_$i"; done