reusing find command results in mplayer arguments

mukami · 01-22-2010, 03:34 PM

I wanted to supply mplayer with the output of find command as arguments. The error returned showed spliced names of files whenever spaces occurred. I have subdirectories in my /home/my_user_name/Music/ directory, and in them multiple *.oga music files. The actual command that I issued was

Code:

mplayer $(find /home/my_user_name/Music/ -name "*.oga")

mplayer started but then was looking for broken file names. I am thinking quoting has to do with it to preserve the filename as one string but different attempts were met with inroads:

Code:

mplayer `find /home/my_user_name/Music/ -name "*.oga"`

gave me the same result and

Code:

mplayer `"find /home/my_user_name/Music/ -name *.oga"`

complained about wrong mplayer syntax. Thanks in advance for your consideration.

colucix · 01-22-2010, 04:11 PM

Here is some suggestions:

1) use the -exec action of the find command to run mplayer. This will start a new process for each audio file, anyway:

Code:

find /home/my_user_name/Music/ -name "*.oga" -exec mplayer {} \;

2) use a while read loop, feeding it using process substitution. This is my favorite method to loop over files containing spaces in their name:

Code:

while read file
do
  mplayer "$file"
done < <(find /home/my_user_name/Music/ -name "*.oga")

3) create a simple one-file-per-line playlist and play it using the -playlist option of mplayer. This will run a single mplayer session:

Code:

find /home/my_user_name/Music/ -name "*.oga" > ./my_music_list
mplayer -playlist ./my_music_list