good looking bash commands

Hey everyone!

I wanted to start a thread about really clean and good looking bash commands. I'll start off.

I make os testbeds a lot out of older computers with floppy drives. To test if there is a floppy in the drive:

if sudo dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/fd0 >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    echo "Floppy is in drive 0."
else
    echo "No floppy in drive 0."
fi

It just tries to write null to the floppy and if there is an error then there is no floppy in the drive.

I thought this was pretty sweet when I came up with it :D

First, having any output on success is wrong (it's not Windows, mate). Second, you used five lines and a dd invocation for something that could be achieved with bash -c "exec 3< /dev/fd0" 2>&1 | grep 'No medium found'. Clean indeed. ;)

Thanks for raining on my parade :)

Can you explain that code?

Seriously, though, improvement's what this thread is for.

"In pursuit of the elusive clean command..." ;)

Well, bash -c "exec 3< /dev/fd0" tries to open /dev/fd0 for reading to file descriptor 3 (0 is stdin, 1 is stdout and 2 is stderr). And 2>&1 redirects stderr to stdout to that we could grep on the error message. If a floppy is present in the drive the error message should be "Permission denied".

In a script that is running with root privileges you can simplify the whole thing to just exec 3< /dev/fd0 and then check the $? (exit status) variable. 0 would mean there's a floppy in the drive and 1 would mean there isn't.

scy said:

"In pursuit of the elusive clean command..." ;)

sudo apt-get autoclean

What about a simple script that converts almost all audio files to aac using NeroAacEnc? It does not do a lot of checking but I use it on my system for a quick and dirty conversion, as a bonus it also copies a couple of the tags across :)

#!/bin/sh
# ----------------------------------------------- #
# Convert most audio files to aac using FFmpeg,   # 
# neroAacEnc and neroAacTag.                      #
# ----------------------------------------------- #      

# Select an input and output filename:

echo -n "Chose an input filename: "
read -e "INPUT"

echo -n "Chose an output filename: "
read -e "OUTPUT"

# Create some metatag variables from the input file:

TITLE=$(ffprobe "$INPUT" 2>&1 | grep -i 'TITLE' | sed 's/.\{24\}//')
ARTIST=$(ffprobe "$INPUT" 2>&1 | grep -i 'ARTIST' | sed 's/.\{24\}//')
ALBUM=$(ffprobe "$INPUT" 2>&1 | grep -i 'ALBUM' | sed 's/.\{24\}//')

# Convert the file to aac:

ffmpeg -i "$INPUT" -f wav - | \
          neroAacEnc -ignorelength -q 0.5 -if - -of "$OUTPUT"

# Add in the tags:

neroAacTag "$OUTPUT" \
           -meta:title="$TITLE" \
           -meta:artist="$ARTIST" \
           -meta:album="$ALBUM"

# Enjoy the music!!

Feel free to make this more useful....

You might want to look at ffprobe's -show_format, -show_streams and -select_stream options, which all output a single key=value pair per line (easier to regex)and output to stdout. For example,

TITLE=$(ffprobe "$INPUT" 2>&1 | grep -i 'TITLE' | sed 's/.\{24\}//')

could become:

TITLE=$(ffprobe -show_format "$INPUT" | grep -i 'TAG:title' | sed 's/.*=//')
##  or even...
TITLE=$(ffprobe -show_format "$INPUT" | sed -n '/TAG:title/s/.*=//p')