JJB Blog » script http://blog.johnjosephbachir.org Wed, 04 Jan 2012 05:47:01 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 An excellent script for removing duplicate files from an iTunes library http://blog.johnjosephbachir.org/2007/05/15/an-excellent-script-for-removing-duplicate-files-from-an-itunes-library/ http://blog.johnjosephbachir.org/2007/05/15/an-excellent-script-for-removing-duplicate-files-from-an-itunes-library/#comments Tue, 15 May 2007 05:25:56 +0000 John http://blog.johnjosephbachir.org/2007/05/15/an-excellent-script-for-removing-duplicate-files-from-an-itunes-library/ After shifting some media around I recently found myself with a lot of duplicate files in my iTunes library. iTunes’ “Show Duplicates” feature is a nice thought but doesn’t come near being useful in the case of thousands of duplicates — not only is the heuristic sophomoric, there is no way to select “every other” file — you must select either all the files or none of them.

I searched far and wide for a third-party program or script and was surprised by how poor the solutions were. I found a handful of shareware programs that were either flakey, underfeatured, overpriced, or all of the above, and a smattering of shell scripts that didn’t do quite what I was looking for.

Finally I came across this applescript, and it does precisely what I want (and what I imagine everyone with this problem wants): finds duplicate songs according to user-specified metadata dimensions, and put “all but one” of each file in a playlist. Select all, option delete, DONE.

]]> http://blog.johnjosephbachir.org/2007/05/15/an-excellent-script-for-removing-duplicate-files-from-an-itunes-library/feed/ 16 Backup script from Jon Mills http://blog.johnjosephbachir.org/2007/01/18/backup-script-from-jon-mills/ http://blog.johnjosephbachir.org/2007/01/18/backup-script-from-jon-mills/#comments Thu, 18 Jan 2007 06:57:01 +0000 John http://blog.johnjosephbachir.org/2007/01/18/backup-script-from-jon-mills/ ibiblio colleague and systems guru John Mills writes:

So, I remember you had a cute backup script for OS X. Well I have an external USB drive, which I don’t want active all the time. My script runs from a cronjob, and automatically mounts and unmounts the external drive, and uses rsync to copy the files.

Here’s the script, called backup.sh:

[bash]
#! /bin/bash

# Definitions
DISK=disk1s1
DIR_NAME=jonmills
SOURCE=/Users/${DIR_NAME}/
DEST=/Volumes/Backup/${DIR_NAME}/
EXCLUDE=/var/log/backup/excludes.${DIR_NAME}

# Mount a disk by hand with disktool
/usr/sbin/disktool -m ${DISK}

# Wait for the disk to spin up, or else this won’t work
sleep 10

# Copy the files with rsync
/usr/bin/rsync -av \
–delete \
–delete-excluded \
–exclude-from=${EXCLUDE} \
${SOURCE} \
${DEST}

# Unmount the disk manually with disktool
/usr/sbin/disktool -u ${DISK}
[/bash]

crontab looks like this:

[code]
#
# min hour mday month wday command

# Run the script at 4:30 AM and mail me the log
30 4 * * * ~/.backup.sh 2>&1 | mail -s "Backup Log - `date`" _____@gmail.com
[/code]

]]> http://blog.johnjosephbachir.org/2007/01/18/backup-script-from-jon-mills/feed/ 1