Multiple Input with Single Input Apps

John — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 23:36:42 +0000

The few eBook formating tools I’ve posted all share one major flaw. They can only handle a single file as input. This is a problem when you want to run it on all or a number of different eBooks. If you are able to use Bash there is a simple way to run any single input command with multiple items.

This first method gets input from a single directory. This method will not go into subdirectories for input.

$ cd ~/Books/author
$ ls -1 *.txt | while read file; do echo $file; ./fix_paragraphs_ebook_txt "$file"; ./remove_extra_whitespace_ebook_txt "$file"; done

This second method gets all files matching the given pattern and will handle subdirectories.

$ find ~/books/ -iname "*.txt" | while read file; do echo "$file"; dos2unix -ad "$file"; ./fix_end_ebook_txt "$file"; done

John's Blog » bash

Multiple Input with Single Input Apps