basic scripting help

[dommccas]

Hi

I've been trying to write a very basic script for the last 2 weeks. The script i want should search for mp3's in the current folder and all subdirectories then it should get the name and artist from the id3 tags and then check to see if there is a folder for that artist and album and if not create them then move the file to the directory. i managed to get it to work if i only want mp3's in one folder but i cant get `ls -R *.mp3` to work so have had to use grep. below is what i have so far.

#! /bin/bash
direc="/home/dominic/Desktop/full albums/"
for CMD in "`ls -R |grep .mp3`"
do
artist=`id3ed -i "$CMD" | grep artist: | sed s/"artist: "//g`
album=`id3ed -i "$CMD" | grep album: | sed s/"album: "//g`
if test -d "$direc$artist"
then
mkdir "$direc$artist"/"$album"/
else
mkdir "$direc$artist"/
mkdir "$direc$artist"/"$album"/
fi
cp "$file" "$direc$artist"/"$album"/
done

At the moment it treats the output from ls as one block when i need to use each line individually.

any help would be massively appreciated

Dom

[vsemaska]

I suggest using the find command as follows:

for CMD in $(find . -name "*.mp3")

[alf55]

Hi

I've been trying to write a very basic script for the last 2 weeks. The script i want should search for mp3's in the current folder and all subdirectories then it should get the name and artist from the id3 tags and then check to see if there is a folder for that artist and album and if not create them then move the file to the directory. i managed to get it to work if i only want mp3's in one folder but i cant get `ls -R *.mp3` to work so have had to use grep. below is what i have so far.

#! /bin/bash
direc="/home/dominic/Desktop/full albums/"
for CMD in "`ls -R |grep .mp3`"
do
artist=`id3ed -i "$CMD" | grep artist: | sed s/"artist: "//g`
album=`id3ed -i "$CMD" | grep album: | sed s/"album: "//g`
if test -d "$direc$artist"
then
mkdir "$direc$artist"/"$album"/
else
mkdir "$direc$artist"/
mkdir "$direc$artist"/"$album"/
fi
cp "$file" "$direc$artist"/"$album"/
done

At the moment it treats the output from ls as one block when i need to use each line individually.

any help would be massively appreciated

Dom

The problem is that you did: for CMD in "`ls -R |grep .mp3`"

The use of the quotes (") around the command execution is a single string. Remove the quotes. A better solution is the find commend. If you have or will have filenames with one or more spaces within the name you should look at the option "-print0".

[i92guboj]

#! /bin/bash

Remove the blank space.

direc="/home/dominic/Desktop/full albums/"
for CMD in "`ls -R |grep .mp3`"

Using these kind of things can be very problematic, overall if the ansi escape sequences for colors and many others are not correctly parsed, plus you will have problems with spaces and probably many more.

Use find, and instead of for, use while on this fashion, because they way someone posted above will fail if the file list is very big:

find "$direc" -name "*.mp3" | while read file
do
.....
done

Alternatively, use the -exec feature of find (though for multiple commands, the while way is more convenient):

find "$direc" -name "*.mp3" -exec <whatever> \;

In the <whatever> part, goes the command. You can use '{}' on that part to reference the current mp3 file.

do
artist=`id3ed -i "$CMD" | grep artist: | sed s/"artist: "//g`
album=`id3ed -i "$CMD" | grep album: | sed s/"album: "//g`
if test -d "$direc$artist"
then
mkdir "$direc$artist"/"$album"/
else
mkdir "$direc$artist"/
mkdir "$direc$artist"/"$album"/
fi
cp "$file" "$direc$artist"/"$album"/
done

Just as a stylistic note: you should use / in the middle of $direc$artist, it's just to improve the readability, and to prevent problems if you later want to parametrize the search path and the user forgets to include the last slash. Note that having redundant slashes is no problem for bash.

[dommccas]

Thanks all. I'll try all of the above. They look much better than my slapdash effort.