MartijnBraam / globrun

Replacement for find|xargs

Globrun

This is a small python script to do the most common usecase (for me) of find | xargs: Simple glob search and execute a command useing a placeholder and 1 file per execution.

The minimal python version for this tool is 3.5 since I use a few of the new methods that break backward compatability (Hey this is a project for fun!).

Installation

Clone this git repository to your favorite location for such repositories (/opt in my example) and add a shell alias to prevent globbing.

# make the script executable
chmod +x /opt/globrun/globrun.py

# zsh
alias globrun="noglob /opt/globrun/globrun.py"

# bash/sh/ksh
alias globrun='set -f;globrun';globrun(){ /opt/globrun/globrun.py "$@";set +f;}

Please note that this script depends on Python 3.5 or higher

Usage

The commandline is:

globrun --preview --verbose --failfast expression -- command-template

--preview/--dry-run
Don't execute the commands, only run the file search and preview the commands that would be executed

--verbose
By default this tool only displays the generated command and the command output. If this flag is set you will get:

• The matched filename
• The generated command based on your template
• Display the exit code also when commands succeed
• Your expression and command template after it has passed through your shell escaping

--failfast
Exit as soon as one of the commands fails.

expression
The glob pattern to find the files. This uses the python3.5 glob.glob(recursive=True) syntax:

* match everything
? match a single character
[abc] match a character that is a, b or c
[1-5] matches 1,2,3,4 or 5
[!abc] match a character that is not a,b or c

It is also possible to use ** for recursion like zsh and fish do. If you use * then every file in the directory will be matched. If you use **/* then every file in the directory and subdirectories will be matched.

If your glob pattern ends with / then you will match directories instead of files.

command
This is the command template that will be used. This is passed through the string.format function in python so you can use everything in the Format Specification Mini-Language

The variables that you can use:

• {file} The file path and name: dir1/dir2/filename.txt
• {name} The file path without extension: dir1/dir2/filename
• {ext} The file extension without dot: txt
• {filename} The file name with extension: filename.txt
• {dir} The directory containing the file: dir1/dir2
• {path} An instance of pathlib.Path from the {file}

Output summary

One of the nice features of this script is that it generates a summary after completing the batch. For example the summary after converting some music with ffmpeg:

Batch completed
  Success: 4
  Failed:  1
  Mean execution time: 0:00:05.368356
  Standard deviation:  0:00:02.999654
  Min/Max time:        0:00:00.037264 / 0:00:07.270456

And without failures:

Batch completed
  Success: 5
  Failed:  0
  Mean execution time: 0:00:06.912867
  Standard deviation:  0:00:00.740558
  Min/Max time:        0:00:06.384255 / 0:00:08.013860

Examples

The obligatory echo example:

$ globrun * -- echo {name}

Listing all directories:

$ globrun */**/ -- echo {file}

Convert some files with ffmpeg (The reason I build this tool).

$ globrun --failfast */**/*.wav -- ffmpeg -i "{file}" -ab 320k "{name}.mp3"

Examples demonstrating the path variable

$ globrun * -- echo {path.name} # Prints the filename without directory
$ globrun * -- echo {path.parents[0]} # Prints a/b/c for a/b/c/d.txt
$ globrun * -- echo {path.parents[1]} # Prints a/b for a/b/c/d.txt