UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Leading zeroes is the preffered chioce for 1-9. Sorry for confusing things.

I also do realize now that'-' is probably a very bad separation character since it can be part of song titles. That's why I used ^t (tab) initially. I think this will be the best chioce, I can easily convert the separation character prior to generating the text files.

Does this mean you want tabs in the filenames? That is possible but will make them somewhat difficult to type.

If there are three dashes, there have been three spaces. Check / edit the input file.



Sorry? Let us look back into post#1:

Thank's for helping out.

You're right. That's probably not a good idea. I guess some other common separation character that's not usually part of things like songtitles would be better. The data from the filenames whill later be extracted and converted to metadata in the file. I believe I can use most characters like for instance '#' or '=' for separation purposes.

I tried your script but I can not make it work. I get:

Code:

./script.sh: line 8: [: missing `]'

Also I'm not shure what filenames should be replaced with. Filetitles I guess is the file with the requested names. But there is no file with the current filenames. I tried to create on using mv *.wav > filenames.txt and then run the script but that didn't work

I suggest @ or %, which have no special meaning by themselves in most shells.

Yes, that's my prefered output. But the input may be both with and without leading zeroes but maybe that's not a problem? It works in both cases?

Regarding separation character, Corona688 helped me realize '-' was a bad choice so unfortunately it got a bit confused.

Generally your small script works but for me to tweak it I need to understand what this part of the code does:

Code:

${NZ#${NZ%??}} ${NFN// /-}

Also, this part, which I guess has to do with leading zeroes is a bit unclear to me:

Code:

NZ="0$Nr"

Yes, NZ="0$Nr" adds a leading zero. 1 --> 01; 12 --> 012

${NZ#${NZ%??}} uses shell's "parameter expansion: remove prefix / suffix pattern" to chop off leading characters preserving the last two.

${NFN// /-} uses "parameter expansion: pattern substitution" to replace all spaces in a string with dashes. You could try to apply it repeatedly to reduce / remove the multiple space occurrences.
See e.g. man bash for reference of the two builtins.