On 8/9/07, Steve Lamb <grey@dmiyu.org> wrote:
> Or should I learn bash scripting anyway?
Learn enough to be able to parse it and convert it to your language of
choice.
That's a valuable advice. It'll save me a lot of time and yet I'll be able
to achieve what I want.
import os
for file in os.listdir('.'):
root, ext = os.path.splitext(file)
if ext.lower() == 'wav':
mp3 = root + '.mp3'
result = os.system("lame -h -b 160 '%s' '%s'" % (file, mp3))
if result:
print '%s not converted' % file
Longer, yes. Easier to follow? Most certainly. Superior, no doubt. The
shell example would miss WAV, Wav, wAv, etc. Secondly the only place we need
to escape the variable is when we need shell to do some work, namely the call
to lame. Finally we don't end up with '.wav.mp3' files all over the place.
We can check the results easily and handle failures gracefully. Can all of
that be done in shell? Certainly. Is it worth doing in shell? Not hardly.
On my Amiga I'm used to ARexx. It has some same advantages over AmigaDOS
like you describe above about bash vs. python. Fortunately there's regina-rexx for
Linux. It has the same syntax and I've already written some scripts combining
regina-rexx and grep. But I think the scope of regina-rexx is somewhat limited
compared to python. But for the moment I can use it and gradually learn bash,
python, perl or whatever suits me.
Greetings, Manon.