Use shellcheck to test script syntax.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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Good job. But don't worry if you have to look up answers. I've been at this for 20 years and I still have to look up and double-check basic syntax like the classic find -exec one. No big deal if only takes a couple of seconds.
This is definitely the sort of thing that LLM AI tools can help with, in theory.
Yeah, you can't keep it all in your head. Knowing what to look up is the better part of the battle.
Pfft...
Good job.
The "one liner" thing is entirely overrated.
Honestly, who the fuck cares...?? 🤷🤷
Thank you! I always worry with a one liner that I'll fuck something up in a bad way. In a script it helps me think about the process since it's more visually structured, and for me it's easier to test.
I'm with them, one line is for showing off, not utility.
Utility has comments!
Edit: BTW, throw a variable in there and you can set up your own handy rename/renumber script for anything!
Look up "shellcheck", find a plugin for your editor. It should help a lot.
This is excellent advice. Bash is fantastic but it has a lot of "foot guns" that can cause problems. Especially where spaces are concerned...
Op: good job with the script
Oh goodness, this looks incredibly useful. Thank you!
Congrats! It's fun and empowering to make your own tools, isn't it?
Absolutely. I love it.
I have studiously avoided learning any bash scripting for the 17 years I've used Linux, so all I can say is good job! Actually just today I found a command that I needed to get a certain appimage to run without crashing, and I remembered enough that I was able to make it into a script (I struggle with whether it's !# or #!). Having just done it today, I can confirm you don't need to include '/bin/bash', just FYI. I believe that is assumed.
~~It makes it usable without typing bash~~. Same would apply for a python script. For example you can make a python script named with no extension and add #!/usr/bin/python to the top of the file. Bash shell sees this and knows to execute the script using that python path.
Then you just include the directory in your $PATH and chmod +x the script. Then you can type $python_script instead of $python python_script.py
Interesting. This particular script I'm just double clicking to run, but I did name it script.sh. If I were to run it in the terminal, I would just do ./script.sh
Yes. You're correct. The script will execute with /bin/bash by default but only in a bash shell. #!/bin/bash is still a good habit to have. Some platforms may be running an "sh" shell by default. In this case if you ran the script it would execute with /bin/sh instead. Which would work or not work depending on if your script was written in purely sh syntax and not using any uniquely bash style syntax.
Bash can run all sh scripts but sh cannot run all bash scripts. So explicitly stating for which one your script was written for is good practice to not run into errors if you move your script to a different environment.
Good job! Flexible tools empower us. Keep it up and spread the love with other people!
Great job!
Learning Bash scripting and Vim is on my to-do list. 🎯
Thanks! I wrote the script in vim too! :D
I'm no vim expert but I do like it.
I really love bash scripting. I use it to symlink my dotfiles from my git repo, to configure my void system the way i like it, dmenu scripts, and i also use it on my laptop to send me notifications when my battery is almost empty, when i plug/unplug the charger, when it's fully charged, and to hibernate when it's lower than 5%. For some reason apps like upower don't seem to work on my laptop so bash offered a solution.
That's fantastic. I'm not using it that deeply yet. I do have other scripts for managing my media files and adding them to my server as I rip music and DVDs. I also am loving learning it and using it.
I've had to learn heavy duty bashing for work, and happily did take the plunge. However, they also had me learn PHP and I'll drop this as a hook and line for OP: you can do shell-script duties with PHP also, and once you hit your head on sed enough times, I hope you remember me telling this. All that string manipulation is much nicer with PHP functions, and for running shell commands there is shell_exec(). :)
Nice! Might modify this and use it for my own collection if that's cool 🤗
Of course! Feel free!! And thank you!
find is super arcane; most people don't know how to use it. Congrats!
(a note for the future with all programming, be careful of numbers with leading zeros, they might indicate base-8, causing your program to fail on 09)