More Improvements to Dired Duplicate Here
On a previous post I created an elisp function to quickly duplicate a file or directory in dired, by default it would copy the dired item under the cursor to an old suffix or append a number based on the universal argument.
Dired Duplicate Here Revisited
(defun my/dired-duplicate-file (arg)
"Duplicate the current file in Dired."
(interactive "p")
(let ((filename (dired-get-filename)))
(setq target (concat (file-name-sans-extension filename)
"-old"
(if (> arg 1) (number-to-string arg))
(file-name-extension filename t)))
(if (file-directory-p filename)
(copy-directory filename target)
(copy-file filename target))
)
)
This worked well for a while but now I want something a little more robust and after working within Krita for a while I decided that I would like to implement its incremental save naming convention.
It’s pretty simple really, just an incremented integer, zero padded to a width of 3, inserted just before the extension:
So I just need to apply a little counter logic but still have the potential to pass in the universal argument and of course avoid overriding any existing backup as it did before.
(defun my/dired-duplicate-file (arg)
"Duplicate a file from dired with an incremented number.
If ARG is provided, it sets the counter."
(interactive "p")
(let* ((file (dired-get-file-for-visit))
(dir (file-name-directory file))
(name (file-name-nondirectory file))
(base-name (file-name-sans-extension name))
(extension (file-name-extension name t))
(counter (if arg (prefix-numeric-value arg) 1))
(new-file))
(while (and (setq new-file
(format "%s%s_%03d%s" dir base-name counter extension))
(file-exists-p new-file))
(setq counter (1+ counter)))
(if (file-directory-p file)
(copy-directory file new-file)
(copy-file file new-file))
(dired-revert)))
I can now create any number of dired file/directory backups quickly from dired (well up to 100).