This dovetails, coincidentally, with something the author of Exiv2, Andreas Huggel, and I were discussing on his projects forum just yesterday and the day before. The "-g" option in his command-line tool, as implemented, has one shortcoming: in the case of metadata tags, keys and fields that can support multiple entries, when invoked, -g only returns the first one.

Right now, you have to use one of the modified capital P (for "Print") options, specifically -Pnv, to get the multi-line data in two columns, and then grep for the key name you want. I was thinking maybe a similar approach, one ...

Code:

fullfiledata=$(exiv2 -Pnv $line)

...with succeeding greps and cuts (or their equivalents in IFS settings and other builtins) to break down the variable fullfiledata into its component parts, which then can be further evaluated by the "if/then/fi" conditional loops, and printed to a file in the same way the current script does (unless there's a better approach to that as well).

Eight calls at once is indeed heavy loading. Especially with Cygwin, which handles that sort of thing pißß-poorly anyway, it's well-known.

This may solve another problem with the script. It hasn't been clearing those *foo2* variables consistently. Before I used the unsets, I had one line of just variable=;nextvariable=; and so forth, which did the job but (idiot me) I thought it was that which was slowing things down. Proof was in the pudding, though; a fieldsmissing.txt file I had my GNOME Terminal create had several line items with the same missing tag -- checked out in XnView, the pics were not missing the tag the list said they were. Root of that problem: a hung variable value from evaluating some earlier line item (maybe one two-dozen lines back in list.txt ).

if "one call [to Exiv2] does it all," the variable-clearing issue and the CPU load problem may both go away. I'll keep the unsets just in case. Now I think I should ask what builtins I can use to break down the "fullfiledata" variable. I've been an external 'junkie' so long in my scripting, I've yet to get my mind around them all, in a big way.

Thanks for the help so far. Hoping it continues.

BZT