OK, heres the situation. I have my mp3s on an ntfs (read only) drive. I copied the m3u playlist to my linux drive so I can edit it. Aside from replacing all '\' with '/' I need to now point the files in the playlist to the directory on the ntfs drive (as the mp3s are no longer local)

E.g. A line that says "Natalie Imbruglia - Torn (MTV's Live And Loud).mp3" has to be changed to "/mnt/windows/shared/music/mp3/Natalie Imbruglia - Torn (MTV's Live And Loud).mp3".

There are lines beginning with a '#' that I need to ignore (alternate lines with # and file name).

I managed to get all lines from the file that dont begin with '#' by using grep -v '#' best7_linux.m3u. But now I'm stuck... how do I add /mnt/windows..etc to the front of each line then put that back into the file (or into a new one)?

I really dont want to have to create a new playlist, since the songs I listen to are a fraction of what I have in my mp3 directory... I dont want to add them all and have to sift through 1000's deleting ones I dont want to listen to.

I'm pretty sure you can do this through linux shell, or at least through a script. If anyone can post the commands or a link to a decent tutorial that would be brilliant.

Cheers.

http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General...ing/PerlIntro/

Perl is the best tool for the job, in case you didn't know it's a scripting language well suited for text processing.


Cheers, and good luck!

man awk

If that does not help get an awk book.

So if I got this right you want to change:
Natalie Imbruglia - Torn (MTV's Live And Loud).mp3
TO:
/mnt/windows/shared/music/mp3/Natalie Imbruglia - Torn (MTV's Live And Loud).mp3


You could do this with sed doing something like:
sed 's/^/\/mnt\/windows\/shared\/music\/mp3\//g' mp3_list
(mp3_list is the name of the file where I saved the list)

IF all the files are in the same folder I would find and replace

first I would find and replace " with "/mnt/windows/shared/music/mp3/
and then I would find and replace .mp3"/mnt/windows/shared/music/mp3/ with .mp3"


hope this helps

Wow, cheers for all the replies on this one.

In the end I downloaded java and wrote my own little program to do it... stick to what you know, eh. I am right now looking through those commands though, will be useful for future reference. Cheers again.

awk, grep (and many forms of grep) and sed are all great text editing tools

personaly i find grep and awk the most useful, sed is out ther in my books :s

I got used to sed and grep and awk is one of those I have to think about and check my notes on.