Hello all. I am currently trying to make a front-end (client) for xmms2. However, I have run into a road block. I need to get the current number of seconds of the current playing song, so one would think to use:

However, all this does is return a blank line. Infact, if I try to do any "formatting" for the "current" command like the man page suggests, I just get a blank line. Does anyone know why this is?

I can't use:

Because it is a non-stopping loop.

By the way, why is xmms2 so completely un-documented? I have never in my life seen a piece of software with less documentation and on-line community.

You need to single quote the format argument, so that the shell doesn't try to expand it first, eg:
My version of xmms2 doesn't have the playtime parameter, so I can't test that here, but the duration parameter worked.

Thank you so much! That worked great.

I am just curious though... what is the difference? Could you explain and make me a little smarter?

The '$' sign is used to indicate a format for xmms2. However, it also has a meaning in the shell. Because the shell sees the '$' first, it expands it out. There is no value 'playtime' in the shell, so it expands to an empty string. That empty string then gets passed in to xmms2, which sees an empty format string, and so it prints an empty line.

Using single quotes tells the shell not to expand anything inside the quotes. The whole string then gets passed in to xmms2, which is able to interpret it.

Cool! Thanks for the lesson... do you have any idea how to get the elapsed time in xmms2? I can get "${minutes}", "${seconds}", and "${duration}" but I have yet to find out how to get the elapsed time. Thanks!