Moving symlinks into a folder based on id3 tags

I'm trying to get my music folder into something sensible. Right now, I have all my music stored in /home/foo so I have all of the albums soft linked to ~/music. I want the structure to be ~/music/<artist>/<album> I've got all of the symlinks into ~/music right now so I just need to get the symlinks into the proper structure. I'm trying to do this by delving into the symlinked album, getting the artist name with id3info. I can do this, but I can't seem to get it to work correctly.

for i in  $( find -L $i -name "*.mp3" -printf "%h\n")
do

 echo "$i" #testing purposes

    #find its artist
    #the stuff after read file just cuts up id3info to get just the artist name
 #$artist = find -L $i -name "*.mp3" | read file; id3info $file | grep TPE | sed "s|.*: \(.*\)|\1|"|head -n1

 #move it to correct artist folder
 #mv "$i" "$artist"

done

Now, it does find the correct folder, but every time there is a space in the dir name it makes it a newline.

Here's a sample of what I'm trying to do

$ ls 
DJ Exortius/
The Trance Mix 3 Wanderlust - DJ Exortius [TRANCE DEEP VOCAL TECH]@

I'm trying to mv The Trance Mix 3 Wanderlust - DJ Exortius [TRANCE DEEP VOCAL TECH]@ into the real directory DJ Exortius. DJ Exortius already exists, so it's just a matter of moving it into the correct directory that's based on the id3 tag of the mp3 inside.

Thanks!

PS: I've tried easytag, but when I restructure the album, it moves it from /home/foo which is not what I want.

Reti

Posted 2010-04-03T01:35:49.387

Reputation: 131

Answers

You should pipe find into while instead of doing for $(find) in order to properly handle filenames with spaces in them.

You can also use process substitution to accomplish the same thing. You would redirect <(find) into the done part of the while loop.

find -L $i -name "*.mp3" -printf "%h\n" | while read -r i
do
    moving_stuff_around
done

while read -r i
do
    moving_stuff_around
done < <(find -L $i -name "*.mp3" -printf "%h\n")

The latter has the advantage of not creating a subshell.

Paused until further notice.

Posted 2010-04-03T01:35:49.387

Reputation: 86 075

You mean, the former has the advantage of not creating a subshell. The latter creates a subshell with the use of parentheses. – Daniel Papasian – 2012-06-05T14:37:30.967

@DanielPapasian: It's true that the process substitution is a subshell. However, my first example creates a subshell by piping a command into the while and variable changes and directory changes are lost/reverted when the while loop terminates. The second does not create a subshell out of the while loop so such changes persist after the while loop terminates. Bash 4.2 has an option shopt -s lastpipe to prevent the creation of a subshell in cases like the first example. Certain other shells (e.g. ksh, zsh) do not create a subshell in the circumstances represented by the first example. – Paused until further notice. – 2012-06-05T15:58:58.493

If you use hard links instead of symlinks then you can leave your unordered pool in place while using EasyTAG to restructure the links.

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams

Posted 2010-04-03T01:35:49.387

Reputation: 100 516

How would I automatically hard link everything into ~/music though? I can do a find . $ -name "*.mp3 -o -name "*.flac" $ to get all of the songs, but then how would I link automatically to ~/music? – Reti – 2010-04-03T22:51:04.313

-exec cp -l -t ~/music {} + – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams – 2010-04-04T02:18:37.040