UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

I need to extract the length of a video file in minutes, not seconds or hours.


How do I get the amount of minutes exclusively?

My crystal ball isn't working well today. Maybe you can help me get a clearer picture...

What operating system are you using?

What shell are you using?

What type of files contain these video files?

What is it that you do that shows you the number of seconds or hours representing the length of these video files? What is the format of the output produced by what you do?

How do you want to calculate minutes? (As a whole number truncated to the number of complete minutes? As a whole number rounded to the nearest number of minutes? As a whole number rounded up to the next minute if there is a picosecond more than the next whole number less than that number? As a floating point value with some specified number of decimal places?)

There are many command line tools (especially linux command line tools) which will return the length of an audio or video file in various string formats. Then it is relatively trivial to convert this string to minutes or seconds..

Which command line tools has you tried so far?

Shall I Google them for you (the original poster)?

I'm happy to Google them for you and post some of them here, but please provide system info (Linux, Solaris, etc).