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I'm trying to figure out how to write a script to automate creating .cbz files from images in folders on OSX.

My directory tree will look like this:

/toplevel/
cbz/
comics/
    Comic1/
        comic1file1.jpg
        comic1file2.gif
        comic1file3.png
    Comic2/
        comic2file1.jpg
        comic2file2.gif
    Publisher/
            Comic3/
                comic3file1.jpg
                comic3file2.gif
                comic3file3.png
            Comic4/
                comic4file1.jpg
                comic4file2.gif

And what I'd like to do is run a script that will find any folder containing actual files rather than subfolders and zip it, rename it from .zip to .cbz and move the .cbz file to the /cbz folder on the toplevel. Any folder that contains subfolders should not contain any files, so that might be helpful. Also I don't expect there to ever be subfolders deeper than what is shown in the example above.

Where I'm at: This snippet will look through a folder and create the .cbz-files for each subfolder.

for dir in `ls`; do zip $dir $dir/*; mv $dir*zip $dir.cbz; done

I've also found some snippets that will do something similar to every subfolder below the selected folder, but I've had varying results and would be very interested to learn the best way of performing an operation only on folders. Also I have NO clue as to how I should check whether a given folder contains subfolders or files. (I guess ideally I should include checks to see if there are both, but for my current scenario that shouldn't ever be the case.) Any ideas?

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  • Welcome to SU! We're not a script writing service. What have you got so far? Where are you getting stuck? Sep 28, 2013 at 14:49
  • I'm sorry if that's how I came across. I have managed to put together this snippet that will do the job for a single level of folders: ´for dir in ls; do zip $dir $dir/*; mv $dir*zip $dir.cbz; done´ and I've managed to make it look for subfolders. My biggest hurdle right now is determining if a folder contains subfolders or files.
    – Martin
    Sep 28, 2013 at 14:59
  • No worries. Please edit your question and include what you've got so far, and describe where/how you're getting stuck modifying it to do what you want. Sep 28, 2013 at 15:00

2 Answers 2

5

Another slightly different solution:

#!/bin/bash
find toplevel/comics -type d -not -empty -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' dir; do
  if find "$dir" -maxdepth 1 -type f | read f; then
    zip toplevel/cbz/"$(basename "$dir").cbz" "$dir"/*
  fi
done
  • find … -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file is a recommended pattern to iterate over find results. Doing a simple find … | while read file works fine, but only if the returned file names do not contain a newline. Parsing ls is never recommended.

  • find "$dir" -maxdepth 1 -type f | read f only evaluates true if files are found in the directory. It achieves the same purpose of @terdon's evaluation of the number of lines output by find.

  • Quotes are needed around all variables in order to prevent whitespace in the file names from breaking the arguments.

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  • Nice, clever to use read that way.
    – terdon
    Sep 28, 2013 at 17:03
  • This seems to work beautifully! I'll accept the answer as soon as the script is done and I can check one of the archives. :)
    – Martin
    Sep 28, 2013 at 17:35
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First of all, never parse the output of ls. Also, you can give zip an arbitrary name for the archive it will create so you don't need to move the files. Try this:

find toplevel/comics/ -mindepth 1 -type d | 
while read dir; do 
    num=$(find "$dir" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f | wc -l )  
    [ "$num" -gt "0" ] && zip toplevel/cbz/"$(basename $dir)".cbd "$dir"/*; 
done

The 1st find command searches toplevel/comics/ for directories (type -d) that are at least one level below (-mindepth 1) the path given (subdirectories). This ensures that find will not return toplevel/comics itself as a result. The results of that find are piped to the while loop which processes each of them saved in the variable $dir. Each $dir is searched for files (-type f) that are actually in that directory and not in sub directories (-mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1). The number of lines returned by the find (that's what wc does) is saved as $num and if it is greater than 0, the directory is zipped and the archive placed into cbz.

NOTES: The archives will contain the full path to the files (test by unpacking one), you might want to give the -j option to zip if you don't want this. See man zip.

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  • 1
    Beat me to it. You might want to double-quote toplevel/cbz/$(basename "$dir").cbd in case the base name is expanded with whitespace. For really paranoid file handling, it should be find … -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' dir; do ….
    – slhck
    Sep 28, 2013 at 16:31
  • @slhck good point about the $(basename "$dir"), answer edited. I didn't include the IFS etc to keep things simple since the OP is just starting with shell scripting and since you have it in your version anyway.
    – terdon
    Sep 28, 2013 at 17:02
  • This is looking very promising, but something still snags. Making some adjustments to reflect the actual file structure I ended up with saving this as "cbzmaker.sh" in what would be the "toplevel" dir: #! /bin/bash find Comics -mindepth 1 -type d | while read dir; do num=$(find "$dir" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f | wc -l ) [ "$num" -gt "0" ] && zip CBZs/"$(basename $dir)".cbz "$dir"; done This seems to find all folders and create zips based on their names, but they all seem to be empty.
    – Martin
    Sep 28, 2013 at 17:28
  • @Martin sorry, my bad, try with the updated version.
    – terdon
    Sep 28, 2013 at 17:39

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