Hallo to everybody, I searched a lot in the net but I wasn't able to paste correctly the information I found.
I have a dir with a lot of jpg files; many of them have quite similar subjects (2 teacher visiting a museum with their students); I'd like to create a movie (I'll use Kdenlive) but I need to order them properly before.
I thought to use imagemagik tools:
I've created a file, called lista, containing all the files name.
If I try
my terminal gives me the correct list with all the date and time of creation.

I'd like to join this info to with the original filename.
I tried
but I obtained a simple copy of all the files from $origdir to $destdir with the original name.

I've tried a bash script too
but I obtained the following error message

I tried to translate the Italian error but I'm not sure if I used the correct terms.

Could you help me to solve this problem?
Thanks in advance.

The do in your for loop must either be preceeded by a semicolon (;) or on on a separate line.

Are you talking about the Italian word "inatteso"? If that was the Italian original then "unexpected" is a better translation. "Unattented" means rather "incustodito" when speaking of luggage.
Ciao,
jdk

I've correct the error; thanks for the input

You're right. Wrong translation.


Unfortunately the script is not yet doing the right renaming: I continue to find non renamed files.

Don't use a for loop on the contents of a file or command input! Always use a while+read loop. Especially when dealing with filenames.

How can I read a file (data stream, variable) line-by-line (and/or field-by-field)?
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/001


Also, $(..) is highly recommended over `..`. Backticks are ugly, more prone to error, and pretty much deprecated.


Use either backslashes or quotes. Not both. I recommend quotes:
Instead of reading from a file, I'd just loop over the files and grab the data directly. You can use a for loop for that.


I also seem to remember that imagemagick has some rather advanced file naming features built in, BTW. You might check the online site documentation.

I'll search for this opion, I started with for loop because I know its structure. :-)

You're right, I'm sorry, I've corrected it in the Code section I used directly from the CLI but not in the script; in anycase I've used only the quotes.

I used the file to work on selected files only.

I red the documentation but I didn't find what i need, sorry, I'll try to read more carefully again.

Thanks Dabid I had been trying to find that page while composing my reply but couldn't as it was not in my bookmarks. Done now.

Dear Sirs, first of all thanks for all your replies.
David, I've not yet iplemented the While loop, I've no time to read carefully the documentation but I'll do asap.

In any case I changed a bit my script, and now it does what I want.
Here the new release.
Now I start from a file called

IMG_4381.jpg

and I arrive at the end with another file called

10-43-58_IMG_4381.jpg

Because the photo was taken on 16th of April at 10:43:58a.m.

Why did I use basename? If your list happens to have a path name included with the filename (such as "Photos/April16/IMG_4381.jpg"), the resulting name as you had it will be a bad filename ("10-43-58_Photos/April16/IMG_4381.jpg"). I use dirname and basename to fix that (now you'll get "Photos/April16/10-43-58_IMG_4381.jpg"). You can remove the dirname part if you want it copied to the current directory (the directory the script is being run in) along with the rest:

Also, the braces around the variable names prevents bash from including characters you do not want interpreted as part of the variable name from doing so. This is preferred to your quotes around "$datascatto" in the cp command above.

There's some basic error checking you can do as well, such as rejecting files with invalid EXIF data (such as none, or malformed file names).

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Hi goumba, thanks so much for the script. I'll study it asap.

If you want to operate on only certain files, it depends on what criteria you need to select them by.

If it's a simple name pattern and you don't need to work recursively, you can usually use a globbing pattern to select them. Bash also has an extra extended globbing system for added selective power.

(From version 4 there's also a new "**" globstar pattern that can be used to do recursive matching. Unfortunately it will currently lock up your shell session if it there are any recursive directory symlinks, so use it with caution.)

For more advanced matching, you probably need to use find, in which case you have to use a while loop with null delimiters (or often you can use its built-in -exec option instead of a shell loop).

You should also use the while loop if you have a file. Again, never use cat like that.

Once a string is in a variable, built-in shell string manipulations is usually better to use instead of external substitution commands (this includes basename, the pattern for which I demonstrated in my last post).

(Even when you do use external commands, a single sed or awk command can cover any number of lower-powered tools. You should almost never need chains of commands like "grep | sed | awk". Learn how to use your tools!)

Brackets around variables are only needed with parameter substitution, and if you have to separate the variable name from other characters that could be mistaken for it. Variable names can include letters, numbers, and the underscore. Otherwise they just clutter up the code and make it easier for errors to slip in. If you don't need it, leave it out.

And to repeat again, don't use backticks for command substitution. "$(..)" is the recommended pattern now.

Finally, QUOTE ALL OF YOUR VARIABLE EXPANSIONS. You should never leave the quotes off a parameter expansion unless you explicitly want the resulting string to be word-split by the shell and any possible globbing patterns expanded. This is a vitally important concept in scripting, so train yourself to do it correctly now. You can learn about the exceptions when you need them.

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/Arguments
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/WordSplitting
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/Quotes

goumba's version above is pretty much what you should be using, except for the unecessary basename and lack of safe quoting.


If you want to process, for example, all .jpg files in the original directory, then glob it like this instead:

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Thank you, David the H, always learning learning something new here.

Certainly not as proficient in shell programming as others - I do little - but glad I got something right.