batch processong on the CLI

content/mass-batch-processing-on-the-CLI.md

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