Erik: Copy from old

Erik — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:18:06 GMT

Copy from old

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[[Category:Tips]]
Often you will want to automate certain commands with BASH. The easiest way to do this is by using file globbing with wildcards otherwise called expansion. For example say I have a directory with the following files in it

$ ls
file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt

If I type

$ ls *.txt
file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt

The Shell will expand *.txt to match any file that matches the pattern of any number of characters followed by a .txt it then sends this list to the ls command. The ls command takes that list as a set and displays the directory listing for each one. Now most commands will work with file globbing but sometimes there are problems. For example if I wish to convert a heap of .jpeg files to 800x600 resolution with one line:

$ ls *.jpeg
img_2992.jpeg img_2994.jpeg img_2996.jpeg img_2998.jpeg img_3000.jpeg img_3002.jpeg
img_2993.jpeg img_2995.jpeg img_2997.jpeg img_2999.jpeg img_3001.jpeg

$ convert *.jpeg -resize 800x600 *.jpeg

$ ls *.jpeg
img_2992.jpeg img_2998.jpeg img_3002-10.jpeg img_3002-16.jpeg img_3002-3.jpeg img_3002-9.jpeg
img_2993.jpeg img_2999.jpeg img_3002-11.jpeg img_3002-17.jpeg img_3002-4.jpeg img_3002.jpeg
img_2994.jpeg img_3000.jpeg img_3002-12.jpeg img_3002-18.jpeg img_3002-5.jpeg
img_2995.jpeg img_3001.jpeg img_3002-13.jpeg img_3002-19.jpeg img_3002-6.jpeg
img_2996.jpeg img_3002-0.jpeg img_3002-14.jpeg img_3002-2.jpeg img_3002-7.jpeg
img_2997.jpeg img_3002-1.jpeg img_3002-15.jpeg img_3002-20.jpeg img_3002-8.jpeg

Of course that was not what we expected. There is an easier solution to this and that is to use BASH's for loop command.

$ for var1 in *.jpeg; do convert $var1 -resize 800x600 $var1; done

$ ls *.jpeg
img_2992.jpeg img_2994.jpeg img_2996.jpeg img_2998.jpeg img_3000.jpeg img_3002.jpeg
img_2993.jpeg img_2995.jpeg img_2997.jpeg img_2999.jpeg img_3001.jpeg

What this command does is loop through all the .jpeg files in the directory and for each file it stores the name of that file in the variable $var1 which is then used as two arguments to convert, the input and output file names respectively.

Basically it looks to the system like this

convert img_2992.jpeg -resize 800x600 img_2992.jpeg
convert img_2993.jpeg -resize 800x600 img_2993.jpeg
convert img_2994.jpeg -resize 800x600 img_2994.jpeg
convert img_2995.jpeg -resize 800x600 img_2995.jpeg
convert img_2996.jpeg -resize 800x600 img_2996.jpeg
convert img_2997.jpeg -resize 800x600 img_2997.jpeg
convert img_2998.jpeg -resize 800x600 img_2998.jpeg
convert img_2999.jpeg -resize 800x600 img_2999.jpeg
convert img_3000.jpeg -resize 800x600 img_3000.jpeg
convert img_3001.jpeg -resize 800x600 img_3001.jpeg
convert img_3002.jpeg -resize 800x600 img_3002.jpeg

You can play with this by echoing the output of the expansion to the console.

$ for var2 in *.txt; do echo $var2 ;done
file1.txt
file2.txt
file3.txt

$ echo *.txt
file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt

Those are similar expansions but not exactly the same.

Note: var1 and var2 are random variable names that I have picked. You can use other variable names like images or textfiles.

Automating tasks with BASH - Revision history

Erik: Copy from old