[sorbus]

Hmm. What's your workflow for reencoding every file in a directory with a name matching a certain pattern and then renaming the reencoded files with a number based on the order that the original files were in? For example, M2441j.avi (an MPEG) should be reencoded into H.264 and then renamed to 23.mp4. All files not matching M###j.avi should be ignored.

Yes, I know that this probably isn't something that you ever do, but humor me. Would you go hunting through, identify all those files and then reencode and rename them by hand? I certainly wouldn't, I would spend maybe five minutes writing and testing a script to do it for me, and then just invoke it every time I needed to do so again in the future.

Programming is all about automation, and the command line is perfect for making programs that do easily repeatable tasks. It's also far easier to debug. As an analogy, do you prefer writing programs by hand or putting together building blocks? It's the exact same thing.