I'm trying to write a conky script that shows my MPD album art, a 'folder.jpg' in the album folder. My current plan is to use mpc -f %file%, which prints out the file name and path, and then cut out the actual file name (i.e. everything after the last /), and use that as the path to for conky's image object.
I'm having trouble with grep/cut, particularly since some songs are nested in two folders, while others are in one. (grep -m 1 . |cut -f1 -d / works for the single folder albums)
How would I go about this? Is there a simpler way I'm missing?
Best Answer
You can use
sedto remove the rest - everything starting with the last slash:mpc -f %file% | head -1 | sed 's:/[^/]*$::'The pattern
/[^/]*$matches a slash, followed by any characters except slash, up to the end of the line. It is replaced by the empty string.The
head -1ignores some status output following the line we want - but see below for how to not pring them in the first place.In case you are not used to sed, the command may look unusual because of the
:used. You may have seensedcommands with/as separator before, like's/foo/bar/'- I prefer to use the separator:for readability, as the expression contains/itself. Alternatively, we could escape the/in the expression:'s/\/[^\/]*$//'- that does not make it more readable.The way you use it with
mpcgives you two additional status lines. The option-qfor quiet switches off all the output. You need to combine-qwith explicitly printing the current playing file to get the line yon need, and nothing more:mpc -q -f %file% current | sed 's:/[^/]*$::'Instead of removing everything starting with the last slash, one could explicitly print everything before the last slash:
mpc -q -f %file% current | sed 's:^\(.*\)/.*$:\1:'That matches any characters that are followed by a
/and any other characters; It matches as much as possible, so that the/that is matched will be the last one.