Hi there,

I'm downloading many files to my server. most of them have *.avi extension. I have unsuccessfully tried to write a script which will list all the avi files to a document and then zip all the avi files and then remove the original avi file. This is what I'm doing manually,

zip -r filename.zip filename.avi
rm filename.avi

Which shell commands should I look to accomplish my goal. I have no experience with shell scripting before. If it is a small code, please post it as well as some good scripting tutorials are also welcomed.

Thanks

gzip <filename>

That will compress it in place and attach .gz to
the file-name. No removing necessary.


Cheers,
Tink

Here's a sample script that might work:

After creating the script file you have to make it executable by doing a 'chmod +x scriptname', and then run it like ./scriptname. You could add in a parameter to accept a directory to work on with $1:

Then run it like this:

./scriptname /tmp

Note that it's late for me, so I take no responsibility for any stupid mistakes I may have made here.

I'd suggest adding a
FS='
'
just in case he has silly spaces in file-names of avi's,
and using [Aa][Vv][Ii], one never knows ;}


Cheers,
Tink

hi all,

I'm a little bit confused, what is "FS". I did a search and found that it means filesystem on linux but I don't know how to use that command. Can you please give an example?

Thanks

I did this and it works. But the problem is that it saves with "filename.mp3.zip" extension. Is there any way of removing .mp3 extension from filenames.

Thanks

I think he meant 'IFS', which is how you define the Input File Separator. Defining IFS to be a blank line as in the example above forces the script to treat the each entire line output by the 'ls -1' command as a single filename. If you didn't do that then a filename with spaces in it would generate an error message because the default IFS is a space, and the shell would think each word in the filename was a separate file.

You could incorporate the 'basename' command into the script and issue a rename (mv) to change the filename after it's been compressed, but if you remove the file extension then you'll have no way of knowing what the file should be when you uncompress it.

Unlike the Mac OS, linux still uses the file extension to determine what a file is and what application it should try to use to open it.

Example:

You have filename.mp3 and you compress it to filename.zip. Later on you uncompress it to filename, but when you try to play it in xmms it doesn't recognize it because it doesn't know it's an mp3 file.

BTW, on another note - you should try zip, compress, and gzip on your files to see which gives you the best compression and then put the one you want into the script.

Ok, it makes sense. I didn't think about that before.

Thank you very much dsegel, you helped my greatly.

Thanks