My Week Learning Linux (03) - Lemmy.World
Another fun week of tinkering! Here’s what I learned: How to implement a for
loop in bash scripts using seq. I’ve been working on a script to create folders
for my tv show library to play nice with my Jellyfin server. What I wanted was
for the script to: - prompt me for the show’s name - query The Movie Database:
Shows api for the show - present me a numbered list of the show results
formatted as index showname year tmdb-id - prompt me to choose the correct
result from the list - create a directory formatted as
Show.Name.(YYYY).[tmdbid-xxxxx] Since the number of results will vary from query
to query, I couldn’t use a preset range like {0..5} for my for loop. I tried
without success to have the loop iterate through the JSON response, but I was
unable to figure out how to do that. So, while likely inelegant, What I did was:
- take the JSON response and pipe it to jq, get the number of results - Since jq
indexes start with 0, take the number of results and subtract 1, setting the
results of that calculation as my $count variable - loop through the JSON using
for i in $(seq 0 $count) ; do to create the indexed list of results to choose
from How to use jq to work with and extract data from JSON objects I’m just
scratching the surface of jq, but I’m finding it very useful! I’ve worked with
JSON before making automations on iOS with the Shortcuts app, so getting up and
running with jq was pretty easy once I understood the syntax. Note: I know tools
like Filebot exist to do the kind of thing I’m doing with this script. I’m
writing my own scripts from scratch in order to learn Git and Github are
different things On my post last week a number of people suggested using Git. I
already was aware of Github, and because I didn’t know what I didn’t know, I
thought Git and Github were parts of a whole. I also generally knew that
Git/Github are used for version control, but that was the extent of my
knowledge. I still know very little, but I do now understand that Git and Github
are independent things that can work together. I also went ahead and set myself
up a gitea instance on my server for when I’m ready to create repositories for
myself for my scripts and dotfiles
This Week in Learning Linux - Lemmy.World
I didn’t get to spend as much time tinkering and learning this week, but I still
learned some new things! 1. Wireguard is great! I had been using OpenVPN because
when I initially set up my machine, my VPN had a bug with Wireguard. I was
setting up a raspberry pi today for some more tinkering, and I decided to try
Wireguard to see if the bug was fixed. Not only is it fixed, but Wireguard is
much easier to work with. Not hating on OpenVPN, but I’ll definitely be
preferring Wireguard going forward. 2. Proper use of find, particularly with
regex. This is ongoing. I’ve been using find for awhile, but not with full
understanding of it’s options and syntax. I’m starting to get a better
understanding of how to use it to find and manipulate the files I’m looking for.
One of the biggest things that’s tripping me up with find and regex is
designating the path. 3. How to set up a new user. This was interesting. I
already knew the basics, adduser -m username, sudo passwd username, but what I
didn’t know anything about was --skel for copying over the skeleton shell config
files. I didn’t even know the skeleton config files existed. 4. The shell prompt
can be customized. This was interesting. I was setting up a non root user on a
vps that I have, and after creating the user, all I had was the $ prompt. No
user@host, and no working directory. After some reading I found that adding
PS1='$(whoami)@$(hostname):$(pwd)$ ' to ~/.profile will show a more traditional
user@host:working/directory$ prompt. I’m sure this is not the only way to do
this, and may not be the best way to do it, but based on my limited knowledge,
it is the way that I’m currently doing it on my vps.
What I've Learned This Week - Lemmy.World
I’ve been homelabbing for a few years now, and recently I’ve really been
focusing in on learning how to use gnu/linux. I thought it might be fun to
periodically share the things I’ve been learning. The stand outs for me this
past week were: 1. Use the full path when referencing files and directories in
bash scripts (Edit: when it makes sense, which is something I’m also still
learning. This mkaes sense when the files will always be located in the same
place.) 2. In a bash script, the variable ${file##*/} will get you the name of
the file your script is handling (example, when looping over files in a
directory. I believe that’s a shell/bash standard variable, but I need to learn
where it came from and how it works) 3. Ubuntu gets a ton of justifiable
criticism, but I find Canonical’s Multipass [https://multipass.run/] to be a
great tool for spinning up Linux virtual machines. Especially on Apple silicon
macs. 4. Piping the output of ls to grep as a variable in a path is a great way
to change to a directory you know exists but can’t remember the exact name of.
(Example: cd ~/movies/“$(ls ~/movies | grep movie-name)”) 5. The reason Mac cli
utilities have syntax variations compared to the standard gnu/linux utilities is
because macOS and its cli utilities are BSD based. This was information I knew
at a high level, but had never really understood the implications of until this
week. 6. Related to point 5, if you’re on macOS trying to learn and you’re
annoyed by the syntax differences between bsd and gnu utilities, you can run
this script from darksonic37 on github [https://github.com/darksonic37/linuxify]
to remove the bsd utilities from macOS and replace them with their gnu
counterparts. (I have not run or reviewed the script. I found mulitpass first,
and so far I’m happy using the Ubuntu virtual machine)
I'm an idiot (arm) - Lemmy.World
So I’ve been banging my head against the wall for about half an hour trying to
install the rar package from the multiverse repository on an Ubuntu 23.10 vm I
have running on my m1 mac mini. I finally ended up on https://pkgs.org
[https://pkgs.org] and searched up rar to see if I could download it directly
instead of using apt. And it was there I realized there’s no arm version of rar.
Side note, any recommendations for an arm utility that handles rar files? I
already have unrar-free installed, but what I need is something to update/add
files to existing rar files. Worst case scenario I unrar them and then repackage
them with tar or zip, but if I can just work with the rar archive, I’d prefer
that.
My First Regex Expressions - Lemmy.World
I’ve been reading Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey E.F. Friedl, and
since nobody in my life (aside from my wife) cares, I thought I’d share
something I’m pretty proud of. My first set of regular expressions, that I wrote
myself to manipulate the text I’m working with. What’s I’m so happy about is
that I wrote these expressions. I understand exactly what they do and the
purpose of each character in each expression. I’ve used regex in the past. Stuff
cobbled together from stack overflow, but I never really understood how they
worked or what the expressions meant, just that they did what I needed them to
do at the time. I’m only about 10% of the way through the book, but already I
understand so much more than I ever did about regex (I also recognize I have a
lot to learn). I wrote the expressions to be used with egrep and sed to generate
and clean up a list of filenames pulled out of tarballs. (movies I’ve ripped
from my DVD collection and tarballed to archive them). The first expression I
wrote was this one used with tar and egrep to list the files in the tarball and
get just the name of the video file: tar -tzvf file.tar.gz | egrep -o
'\/[^/]*\.m(kv|p4)' > movielist Which gives me a list of movies of which this is
an example: /The.Hunger.Games.(2012).[tmdbid-70160].mp4 Then I used sed with the
expression groups to remove: - the leading forward slash - Everything from .[ to
the end - All of the periods in between words And the last expression checks for
one or more spaces and replaces them with a single space. This is the full sed
command: sed -Eie 's/^\///; s/\.\[[a-z]+-[0-9]+\]\.m(p4|kv)//;
s/[^a-zA-Z0-9\(\)&-]/ /g; s/ +/ /g' movielist Which leaves me with a pretty
list of movies that looks like this: The Hunger Games (2012) I’m sure this could
be done more elegantly, and I’m happy for any feedback on how to do that! For
now, I’m just excited that I’m beginning to understand regex and how to use it!
Blue Alien Pinup - Lemmy.world
After a couple of years of not shooting at all (depression is great eh?), I got
back into the studio with my friend/model @[email protected].
We wanted to do something fun and relatively simple to sort of get my creative
engine going again. We had a blast shooting, chatting, jamming to some tunes,
and got some great photos too. It felt really good to be creative again, and
we’re going to do a pink/yellow alien shoot later this month. Technical details
(for those of you interested): Equipment used: Olympus OM-D EM-5 Mk II with the
M.Zuiko 12-40mm f2.8 lens at 14mm 3 x Godox AD 200 lights with the bulb heads
Two umbrellasOne gridded 24” softboxWhite vinyl backdrop Exposure settings: ISO
200, f7.1, 1/250 Lights Two lights with umbrellas in a cross pattern to light
the backdrop for the seamless white look. Set to 1/2 power. One light in the
gridded softbox above and at camera right at 1/4 power.
