UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I appreciate the suggestions. Likely as not I'll be coming up with some scripts very much like this one in the near future, so I'll keep this thread bookmarked.

What I failed to mention is, while I write the filenames I want into the "homeperm" or "curl -o" command, I usually paste in the source URLs from the clipboard of whatever OS I happen to be using. This gave me a bit of a headache just using $1 as input from the line, as curl only saw the filename as I typed it and didn't have anything for a URL. It wasn't until I echo'd what curl was getting for input that I gleaned what I was doing wrong.

Then I thought, "If there's a $1, shouldn't there be a $2? Single spaces are seen by BASH as a break, if not a delimiter, aren't they?" So I tried this line near the top of the script:

Code:

echo -e "$1 $2"

and invoked the script (with a standby alias, "homecourt"). Sure enough, the URL printed to stdout right after the filename as sure as dinner follows lunch. cUrl downloaded the file, and the code I had written to annotate the dates ran smooth as melted butter.

Here's the final script.

Code:

#!/bin/bash
actiondate=$(/usr/bin/date)
echo -e "$1 $2 $actiondate"
clockdate=$(date '+%d %B, %Y.')
myfile=$1
myurl=$2
curl -o $myfile $myurl
fulldate=$(stat -c %y $myfile)
shortdate=${fulldate%.*}
exiv2 -kM"set Exif.Image.DateTimeOriginal Ascii $shortdate" $myfile
exiv2 -kM"set Iptc.Application2.SpecialInstructions String Downloaded $clockdate" $myfile
exiv2 -kM"set Exif.Image.DocumentName Ascii $myurl" $myfile
echo -ne "File $myfile downloaded and annotated with date and time.\n\n"

Thanks again for the suggestions.

BZT