61 lines
2 KiB
Markdown
61 lines
2 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: Mass batch processing on the CLI
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date: 2022-03-19
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---
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> This post is day 4 of me taking part in the
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> [#100DaysToOffload](https://100daystooffload.com/) challenge.
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Some time ago, I needed to process a lot of video files with vlc. This is
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usually pretty easy to do, `for file in *.mp4 ; do ffmpeg ... ; done` is about
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all you need in most cases. However, sometimes the files you are trying to
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process are in different folders. And sometimes you want to process some files
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in a folder but not others. That's the exact situation I was in, and I was
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wondering if I needed to find some graphical application with batch processing
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capabilities so I can queue up all the processing I need.
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After a bit of thinking though, I realized I could do this very easily with a
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simple shell script! That shell script lives in my [mark-list](https://github.com/SeriousBug/mark-list)
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repository.
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The idea is simple, you use the command to mark a bunch of files. Every file you
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mark is saved into a file for later use.
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```bash
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$ mark-list my-video.mp4 # Choose a file
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Marked 1 file.
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$ mark-list *.webm # Choose many files
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Marked 3 files.
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$ cd Downloadsr
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$ mark-list last.mpg # You can go to other directories and keep marking
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```
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You can mark a single file, or a bunch of files, or even navigate to other
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directories and mark files there.
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Once you are done marking, you can recall what you marked with the same tool:
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```bash
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$ mark-list --list
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/home/kaan/my-video.mp4
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/home/kaan/part-1.webm
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/home/kaan/part-2.webm
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/home/kaan/part-3.webm
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/home/kaan/Downloads/last.mpg
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```
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You can then use this in the command line. For example, I was trying to convert everything to `mkv` files.
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```bash
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for file in `mark-list --list` ; do ffmpeg -i "${file}" "${file}.mkv" ; done
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```
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It works! After you are done with it, you then need to clear out your marks:
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```
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mark-list --clear
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```
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Hopefully this will be useful for someone else as well. It does make it a lot
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easier to just queue up a lot of videos, and convert all of them overnight.
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