Commands tagged kludge (1)

  • Just a quick hack to give reasonable filenames to TrueType and OpenType fonts. I'd accumulated a big bunch of bizarrely and inconsistently named font files in my ~/.fonts directory. I wanted to copy some, but not all, of them over to my new machine, but I had no idea what many of them were. This script renames .ttf files based on the name embedded inside the font. It will also work for .otf files, but make sure you change the mv part so it gives them the proper extension. REQUIREMENTS: Bash (for extended pattern globbing), showttf (Debian has it in the fontforge-extras package), GNU grep (for context), and rev (because it's hilarious). BUGS: Well, like I said, this is a quick hack. It grew piece by piece on the command line. I only needed to do this once and spent hardly any time on it, so it's a bit goofy. For example, I find 'rev | cut -f1 | rev' pleasantly amusing --- it seems so clearly wrong, and yet it works to print the last argument. I think flexibility in expressiveness like this is part of the beauty of Unix shell scripting. One-off tasks can be be written quickly, built-up as a person is "thinking aloud" at the command line. That's why Unix is such a huge boost to productivity: it allows each person to think their own way instead of enforcing some "right way". On a tangent: One of the things I wish commandlinefu would show is the command line HISTORY of the person as they developed the script. I think it's that conversation between programmer and computer, as the pipeline is built piece-by-piece, that is the more valuable lesson than any canned script. Show Sample Output


    2
    shopt -s extglob; for f in *.ttf *.TTF; do g=$(showttf "$f" 2>/dev/null | grep -A1 "language=0.*FullName" | tail -1 | rev | cut -f1 | rev); g=${g##+( )}; mv -i "$f" "$g".ttf; done
    hackerb9 · 2010-04-30 09:46:45 7

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