On Tue, Aug 07, 2007 at 04:23:28PM -0700, David Brodbeck wrote:
>
> On Aug 7, 2007, at 4:04 PM, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
>> oh. I see. That is the right one. but, doesn't really work if you need
>> to recurse into stuff does it, which was my problem with that find in
>> the previous post.
>
> To do this with find, I'd try something like this:
>
> find . -name "*.wav" -exec lame -h -b 160 \{\} \{\}.mp3 \;
I do this one frequently to tar up small video files from a
surveillance system
find ./cam{1,2} -daystart -mtime +3 -exec tar -xzf '{}' + &
and its all over but for the processing.
>
> It's possible spaces will bite you here, too ... If you actually attempt
> this on filenames with spaces, test it first and see if you need to add
> another level of quoting.
its inevitable that these sorts of tasks have to be done on exactly
the kinds of files systems that have space: music folders or some
such...
Note that you have to escape the curly brackets
> and the semicolon so find sees them, instead of bash trying to interpret
> them. Find's syntax for the "exec" action is kind of awkward-looking, but
> this can be an extremely useful tool. For example, I once had to
> decompress a bunch of gzipped files in a directory tree, so I did something
> like this:
>
> find . -name "*.gz" -exec gunzip \{\} \;
>
> Note that find -exec can also do a lot of damage in a hurry. If you're
> doing anything remotely destructive, you might want to substitute "echo
> \{\}" for your command the first time you run it, just to make sure find is
> only finding the stuff you want it to! Also, before you start thinking of
> doing anything resembling "-exec rm" note that find has a built-in ability
> to delete files.
hmm... i'll look into that rm feature, but yes I routinely use -exec
echo '{}' first...
Regardless, its powerful and fun and once you've learned it, its
incredibly efficient. my wife gets frustrated watching over my
shoulder as I usually have to take a few cracks at it before I get it
right. She says something about how she could be done already using
the mouse and then I change from my sample tree to the real one and
process several hundred files in about 20 keystrokes... then I get to
be smug. :)
A
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