Naming files

Effective organisation of files through naming.

The original sources of these notes, which were developed by Jenny Bryan, can be found here: http://www2.stat.duke.edu/~rcs46/lectures_2015/01-markdown-git/slides/naming-slides/naming-slides.pdf

Transcript

1. File naming Peter Kamerman Based on notes by Jenny Bryan (@JennyBryan) [link to the original slides] Effective organisation of files through naming
2. File naming Key principles • Machine readable • Human readable • Plays nicely with default file ordering
3. Machine readable Making searching and extracting information easier • Regular expression and globbing friendly (avoid white space, punctuation, accented characters; stick to one letter case) WRONG: Bjørn’s Awesome Slides.pptx BETTER: bjorns-awesome-slides.pptx • Easy to compute on (deliberate use of delimiters to separate meta-data units) WRONG: file 1 bjorns awesome slides 2020/10/10.pptx BETTER: file-01_bjorns-awesome-slides_2020-10-10.pptx In this use case: Underscores “_” were used to delimit units of meta-data; Hyphens “-” were used to separate words/numbers within each meta-data unit
4. Human readable Make it easy to know what is in a file • Embrace the “slug” (Human readable information on file content) WRONG: figure-01.png BETTER: figure-01_bill-length-vs-flipper-length.png The slug: bill-length-vs-flipper-length
5. Plays nicely with default ordering Making finding files easier • Put something numeric first • Use ISO8601 date format (YYYY-MM-DD) • Pad numbers (e.g., 01, not 1)
6. Plays nicely with default ordering Making finding files easier WRONG: analysis-script-10.R analysis-script-1.R analysis-script-2.R … analysis-script-9.R clean-data.csv clean-data-final.csv clean-data-final-v2.csv raw-data.xlsx BETTER: 01_analysis-script_descriptive-statistics.R 02_analysis-script_linear-regression.R … 10_analysis-script_figures-for-manuscript.R 2020-01-03-raw-data.xlsx 2020-01-04_clean-data.csv 2020-01-06a_clean-data.csv 2020-01-06b_clean-data.csv
7. Final bit of advice Never use the word “final” in a file name