sh Scripting - String Manipulation

[Drew Tomlinson]

On 10/13/2005 9:03 PM Paul Schmehl wrote:

> --On October 13, 2005 4:04:45 PM -0700 Drew Tomlinson 
> <drew at mykitchentable.net> wrote:
>
>> I'm working on a script that reads a directory using 'find' and its
>> '-exec' primary to create a symlink to the file.  So for example, I have
>> the following command:
>>
> find /multimedia/Pictures -iname "*.jpg" -print | cut -d'/' -f4
>
> You'll have to play with the field value (-f) to get the right 
> location, but this would return only the filename.


Thanks for your reply.  I will look at 'cut'.  Didn't know about that 
one.  :)

>> This command returns a bunch of filenames.  Here's an example of one:
>>
>> /multimedia/Pictures/2005 Kimberly & Rich/IMG_1210.JPG
>>
>> What I'd like to is get '-exec' to run this command:
>>
> I don't understand what you're trying to do here.
>
>> ln -s "/multimedia/Pictures/2005 Kimberly & Rich/IMG_1210.JPG" "2005
>> Kimberly & Rich/IMG_1210.JPG"
>>
> Are you trying to create symlinks in a different directory?  If so, 
> why not do this?


Yes.

> ln -s dir1/ dir2/
>
> Then, when you add new files to dir1/ they will automatically show up 
> in dir2/ because the dir is symlinked rather than the individual files.


That's a good idea (and something else I never thought of) if I wanted 
all the files, not just the *.jpg files.  And as I'll explain below, I 
intend to expand this script to work with additional directories where I 
might just want the *.mp3 or the just the *.avi, *.mpg, etc.  My thought 
was to build a script and run it through cron to keep the symlinks updated.

> What exactly are you trying to accomplish?


I have a FBSD 5.4 box running Samba.  One of the shares on that box 
contains all of my pictures, video clips, and music.  I have built a 
MythTV box on Gentoo.  My first thought was to just mount the smbfs 
share on the Gentoo box so that MythTV could access my media files.  But 
then I found out that MythTV needs write access to the share so it can 
cache thumbnails and video information.  I don't want MythTV writing to 
my FBSD box because then it messes up other stuff that uses the same 
share.  Thus my idea was to mount the share read-only and create 
symlinks to the files in a local directory on the Gentoo box.  Then 
MythTV could write its files locally and leave the FBSD box unaltered.

So specifically, I have the FBSD share mounted on the Gentoo box as 
/multimedia.  Within the FBSD share are subdirs named Pictures, Video, 
and Music.  Underneath these folders are many sub folders that contain 
the actual files.  I want to make symlinks on the Gentoo box in 
/tv/multimedia for each of these directories but lose the subdir 
structure.  I need to loose the subdir structure as MythTV doesn't 
recurse directories in some instances (specifically the MythGallery plugin).

So in the above example, the Gentoo box sees "/multimedia/Pictures/2005 
Kimberly & Rich/IMG_1210.JPG" as the original file mounted read-only.  I 
want a symlink named "/tv/multimedia/2005_Kimberly_&_Rich-IMG_1210.JPG" 
to point to "/multimedia/Pictures/2005 Kimberly & Rich/IMG_1210.JPG".  
But please note that some files are more nested than the above example.

Hopefully, this makes sense?  But being new to scripting and knowing 
enough about *nix to realize there's lots of ways to accomplish any one 
task, I'm looking for guidance and suggestions as to the "most generally 
accepted" way to go about this one.  :)

Thanks for your time,

Drew

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