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camera pictures and their file names, PDF files – if you want them to carry some date they already have inside their header …

For accessing the EXIF header there are a couple of utilities available, “exif –xml-ouptut” and “exiftool -s”; for PDF the package “xpdf” provides a utility called “pdfinfo -meta -rawdates”. All of them can provide you with quite a few date-time-strings from the respective heards.

Long ago I wrapped these utilities in nice little shell scripts, that take all these date-time-strings and list the possible renaming commands with descriptive comments (“mv … … # …”) on STDOUT, so that you can pick from the alternatives.

One variant of my wrapper scripts suggests renamings, that put the date-time-string at the beginning of your file name, so that your files will get sorted by the date and time, that they got created on – that’s usually, what I pick.

The other variant puts the date-time-string right before the extension of the file.

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