#29

You can also fire off things to run in the background by adding an ampersand & to the end of your set of commands (piped or otherwise), it will return a PID + job number and will also report when that PID completes/fails/whatever… Also, fg accepts job number as an argument if you have more than one thing backgrounded.

I actually use the vimium extension in chrome so I can use vim shortcuts to browse, great for browsing when i’m on the laptop on the couch and don’t want to use the touchpad.

2 Likes
#30

I found that putting together small bash scripts to solve small problems makes a cool (executable) library of commands along with real world examples of how to use them…

2 Likes
#31

I’ve got a bunch of 24-bit WAV files I need to convert into 16-bit. Here’s a command I ended up with:
find . -name '*.wav' -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -t -r -I {} sox {} -r 44100 -b 16 {}
It got so close to working but since I’m saving the files with the same name they all got corrupted. How could I fix this? It probably makes most sense to move them into a different directory.
Thanks in advance

1 Like
#32

One-liners are amazing, however I never use them. I find it much easier to make “real” code, it’s easier to get working, it’s easier to maintain…

#!/bin/bash
tmp=$(mktemp /tmp/tmp.XXXX.wav)
for i in `find . -name '*.wav' -type f`; do
    sox $i -r44100 -b16 $tmp
    mv $tmp $i
done
4 Likes
#33

Julia Evans (@b0rk on twitter) has some great command line tips in the form of comics on her site: https://wizardzines.com/comics/#bite-size-command-line

3 Likes
#34

people are all over find lately but I find piping ls through grep easier to remember – you can replace the whole find bit with ls | grep -e wav$ if all the files are in the directory you’re working in (ie not a subdirectory). ls lists all the files in the working directory, grep -e filters the input by a regular expression (you might also have egrep available which does the same), wav$ is a regular expression which matches any file or folder ending in wav

#35

I was just trying to match the @john-smith example as close as possible.

As you mention ls is local, find is recursive…

#36

oh yeah, didn’t mean that as a criticism, just another way of doing things

[edit: that said, I should really just get around to internalizing the find flags…]

#37

Check this out:

find | grep wav$

versus

ls | grep wav$

No need for -e! find and ls to me are equally easy to remember (in basic forms), but are both useful in different situations…

1 Like
#38

semi related to find but not much else— i recently discovered fzf, super helpful

#39

Thanks for putting that together — it was largely the fact that I needed to create temporary files that was throwing me off :slight_smile:

#40

The reason for find is its ability to make complex decisions as it traverses a file system tree; Find is not just a “set of flags” but an ordered set of instructions on how to search that tree, including which nodes to enumerate and which branches to cull (this is why the man/info pages are so extensive). Ls only has as much power to traverse as shell globbing affords, and no ability to arrest traversal. Using find where a shell glob would work is unnecessary, but shell globs and ls are in no sense a replacement for find.

1 Like
#41

Actually I’m finding this isn’t working. :confused: First of all it didn’t seem to be able to handle spaces in folder names, then when I removed spaces it just did… nothing. I can’t see anything I’m doing wrong on my end, very confusing

#42

Shell scripts have a tough time with filenames that have spaces, though usually that goes away if you put variables inside of quotes “$like_this”.

#43

For spaces and other special characters, you’ll need to escape them with a \
Such as:

$ find . -name Unreal\ Projects
./Unreal Projects
./Documents/Unreal Projects
1 Like
#44

Again: I was deliberately trying to work with your original one-liner. Yeah spaces in are not so fun.

On topic: I don’t have any spaces in file names, which to me seems like the simplest solution

Off topic: when doing more involved tasks, I quickly switch to python (from bash), I find it much more robust and elegant. For a purpose similar to yours I wrote a python script “a2wav”, which is an elaborate wrapper around sox.

1 Like
#45

Has anyone been playing with Ish? It’s an Alpine emulator for ipadOS/iOS. I almost entirely set up a Pi Hole with it :grinning:

1 Like
#46 
for file in *.wav; do ffmpeg -i $file -ar 44100 -b:a 320k ${file%.*}.mp3; done

save yourself (from all that clicking seriously)

edit: bonus: id3mtag

6 Likes
#47

Ish looks nifty! Too bad it needs TestFlight

#48

yum - this looks better than sox