Dienstag, 5. August 2014

Automate html creation with the linux dash

Overview

This article describes the basic concepts for html generation with the linux dash command interpreter.


Example: Video Collection

The dash command line interpreter can be used to generate video player websites for each video in a directory.

Example: Video Collection
Example Video Collection


Dash commands


for - loop through files

Use the for-command to loop through every file. The example below loops through all mp4-files.
for filename in *.mp4;do echo $filename; done

The for-command can also be used to generate video thumbnails and background-images with a video formats converter.


while - loop through code lines

Use the while-command to loop through every line of a file. The example below will read the html template file template.html and loop trough all its lines and replace the SSI-variable *VARIABLE* by the dash variable $variable. In this example the output file is vidcenter.html.
while read line;do
    line=$(echo $line | sed "s/\*VARIABLE\*/$variable/")   
    echo $line >> "vidcenter.html"
done < "template.html"

Conclusion

'for' and 'while' are handy dash commands for linux to generate html from templates, replace variables and run video converters on the fly.