Okay, so I spent some time today tackling this little annoying thing that’s been on my list forever. Just a small personal script, you know? Nothing fancy. It’s supposed to help me organize files I download, chuck them into the right folders based on type or name. But it had this stupid bug.
What Was Going Wrong
The main problem was with files that had similar names. Like, say I had ‘Project_Report_*’ and then later ‘Project_Report_*’. Sometimes the script would get confused. It might overwrite one with the other, or just dump them in the wrong spot entirely. Drove me nuts, honestly. It wasn’t consistent, which made it even more annoying. Been meaning to fix it for ages.
Digging In
So, first thing, I pulled up the script file. Hadn’t looked at it in months. Took me a minute to even remember how I’d set it up. Read through the logic, especially the part that figures out the filename and decides where it goes.
It became pretty clear the logic was just too simple. I think I was doing some basic check, maybe just looking at the start of the filename or something equally crude. Didn’t account for variations like ‘_draft’ or ‘_v2’ properly.
- Opened the script in my basic text editor.
- Found the section handling file naming and sorting.
- Ran the script manually on a few test files to see it fail again. Yep, still broken.
Trying a Fix
My first thought was, okay, let’s make the check a bit smarter. Maybe split the filename more carefully? I fiddled around, added a condition to look for underscores or version numbers maybe. Ran it again.
Well, it kinda worked for some cases but messed up others. Typical. Made it slightly better for ‘version’ files but then it got confused with files that naturally had underscores in their names for other reasons. Back to the drawing board.
Getting it Right (Finally)
Okay, second attempt. I realized I needed to be more exact. Instead of guessing parts of the name, I decided to compare the entire filename before the extension. If ‘Project_Report_draft’ and ‘Project_Report_final’ are the base names, they are clearly different, right? The script should see that.
So I changed the logic to grab the full name minus the ‘.docx’ or whatever extension it had. Then it would use that whole string for its comparisons and sorting rules. Seemed more robust.
Testing Time
This felt better. To be sure, I created a bunch of tricky files:
- report_*
- report_v1_*
- report_*
- summary_*
- summary_notes_*
- image(1).jpg
Then I ran the updated script. Pointed it at my test folder. Watched the output… and boom! It worked perfectly. Each file landed exactly where it was supposed to. No overwrites, no weird folder choices. The logic held up.
Felt pretty good to finally get that sorted. Just a small thing, but those little persistent bugs can be the most irritating. Glad I took the time today to just sit down and hammer it out. Done. Next!
