Hi all!

Just been pulling my hair out for too long now, so am giving in and asking for help..

Problem : Have a large directory tree of web templates, looking to create a set of jpg or png thumbnails of them.

Direction : am currently using something along the lines of ..

find /home/me/webtemplates/ -name index.html -exec khtml2png '{}' /home/me/thumbnails/.....

The end bit is where the problem arises - essentially I want to take full pathname (ie. {}) and convert it into name which is acceptable as a filename (ie. replace / with - or something similar). Any ideas/clues.

To save time, all the other parts work, the find will return all the paths, khtml2png works and if replace the output name with a fixed term it goes through and converts each file to thumbnail, just overwriting each time. But the main point is that the out files must be named to relate to the location of the source document.

Have now spent 5 hours tinkering with this, so any request I read the manual or google, please be more specific (ie. which man or which search time) as I've seen many searchs on the web have ended with a 'google it' recommendation and I'm feeling the urge to scream everytime I see it! ;-)

Thanks in advance for any help.

Regards,
Ryan

Would something like this be of any use?

find /home/me/webtemplates/ -name index.html | perl -ne'chomp; $old = $_; s/\./_/g; system("khtml2png $old $_")'

The major problem you're facing is copying a string, and then only changing one instance of it. There are plenty of tools for changing every instance of a string, tr, sed, xargs -i, but since you need to keep a hold of the original as well, you'd need to store it somewhere else while the translation is happening, and bash isn't too happy with evaluating find's {} inside of a `` (or similar).

It'd be pretty simple for Perl to do the entire job, rather than just the translation, but keeping the original find in place, and having perl just call khtml2png keeps things relatively simple to modify.

Thanks! Worked a treat, I think I had to swap s/\. for s\// - but I could it out from there :-) You've saved me from another few hours of hair pulling :-) [Can't paste exactly, as it's on my home machine]

I suspected that perl held the answer, but knew nothing about it, I'm already looking forward to playing around with it some more :-)

Regards,
Ryan