Seems like maybe a programming question, but my experience has been that admins are the right crowd for this?
A. I have about 10,000 files that are just enumerated and all in one directory - fl000001.pdf....
B. I also have a comma delimited file with meta-data for these files (i.e. filename, ImageID, Author,Date,Client).
This will end up being a largely static data-set, and we're going to use the file system to organize them by concatenating the fields together and renaming/move them to that (so f:\data\2012-12-23\author\clientname.pdf).
This is pretty trivial and I've done a lot of this and I'll probably use Python, but I would like to take it to the next step, and I think I've seen this, so I'm looking for some referral and further suggestions for the exercise.
Isn't there some way (other than rolling back a vm) to virtualize the files system, or a portion of the file system, so that any changes I make don't actually take until I commit them, or maybe do the same operation on a non-virtualized part of the file system after just testing it on the virtualized file system?
I found sandboxie and that seems like the right guy but are there other application/methods/suggestions that are appropriate for this? http://www.sandboxie.com/ Has anyone used sandboxie for this kind of thing? Other ideas, is the payoff for this too low? ;)
Background:
Many times, the client doesn't know exactly what they want, and I'm thinking this would be an easy way to set some program parameters, run the rename, which is fast, but hard to roll-back (unless I did it programmatically, but since it might fail, this seems easier?), they can get a look, right there in the meeting they get a look, we can adjust, roll the file system back, and re-run the rename.
I can do this in either windows 7, windows 2008r2, or linux - no macs and I'll sanitize/enumerate-names and so on so that hopefully it's very dumbed down file names to be tolerant of file system limitations/quirks/rules.