This little script enables you to "edit an ls", i.e. it will load a list of filenames into your favorite editor (presumably vi). Any changes to the filenames will result in renaming the respective files.

Notes:

• Do not change the numbers in the first column, unless you know exactly what you're doing.
• If you remove an entire line, the corresponding file will not be deleted. It just remains untouched.
• You can use any character except newlines in filenames, with one special case: backslashes have to be specified twice.
• If there are any filename collisions, you will be asked if overwriting the first file is OK.
• Do not try to exchange the filenames of two or more files. It won't work.
• If you want to edit the filenames of certain files only, you can specify them on the command line (the default is *).

Authorship

Original author: Oliver Fromme olli@fromme.com

Oliver's version can be found here: https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/vils/

This modernized version is by Daniel Zwell.

License: BSD

Alternatives

Simon Schiele ported the original script to bash and added additional options: https://github.com/simonschiele/vils-ng

Another script called "vidir" is part of the moreutils package. I do not recommend it, as its interface leads to accidental file deletion.