Great thanks, I think a Perl script will be the way. I’ll have a look and see if I can figure it out.

I don’t have excel installed using open office instead. I did see a method using excel but was it able to get information from a txt or epg file?

Anuhow thank for all the help. I’ll let you know how I get on.

I do not think I’m going to be able to get my head around Perl any time soon.

If you can offer any help Son-T that would be great; you really are a bright light. I’m going to be using this system for a while as I’ve this PVR built it to my TV…

While posting I’d also like to thank everyone for all their efforts. I would never of got this far on my own. Just being able to backup and save recordings for prosperity is really cool. Thanks.

Ok I changed the end of the script a little

to

though the ideal code would have the first 13 characters of “$fname[0]” at the end of the file to preserve any unique ID.

I am doing this as if the names been shortened it uses … to separate the the two half of the file name and it can not cope with : in the title, like this

“i7The Story of Science: Power,… i7…Proof and Passion. 3/6. How Did We Get Here?: Michael M”

Also I would like to be able to keep 2/3 or 1/5 in the file name as 2of3 or 1of5 but your code seems to remove any numbers from the $fname and I can’t figure it out or how to change / to ‘of’ ….right now.

Thanks again,

And this code to get the date off films only and add them to tile in brackets.

# grab the first word of title in epg
$title =~ /(w+)/;
print “EPG title: $1n”;

#if filename matches first word of title then we have the correct synopsis
if($file=~ /$1/)
{
# do nothing
print “matched first entry in epgn”;
}
#else look at the 2nd EPG entry
else
{
# check for next epg entry
print “getting second epg entryn”;
$title=substr($epg,354,49);
$title=~ s/(00+$)//g;
$desc=substr($epg,406,254);
$desc=~ s/(00+$)//g;
# print “>$title<n>$desc<n”;
}
# search for episode name between ‘.’ and ‘:’
$desc =~ /(d{4})/;
print “Episode name: $1n”;

#if episode name exists, rename all files with episode name appended
if($1)
{
@fname=split(/./,$file);
print “renaming $file $title $1n”;
rename (“$fname[0].epg”,”$title ($1).epg”);
rename (“$fname[0].elu”,”$title ($1).elu”);
rename (“$fname[0].hre”,”$title ($1).hre”);
rename (“$fname[0].ts”,”$title ($1).ts”);
}
else
{
print “no episode namen”;
}
}