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