Before I fully make the switch to Linux I’m looking for options to replace an old Windows program called SCRU. You set a folder to watch, and an output folder and it automatically copies specified extensions or extracts rar into the output folder.
I’m trying to figure out if there’s a way to do this in terminal and haven’t dug into scripts yet, just want to know of it’s possible.
Sounds like a nifty program. Is this something you use a lot? What’s the use case? While I know extracting files is not difficult in Linux, there are a lot of different compressed file types. Most have some Linux alternative. Linux is different from windows, in that most things that require a separate program to be installed, are usually default operations. Most file managers offer to compress or extract in the right click menu. Try a live distro for a few days. It will blow your mind.
Server. It’s great for automation. SCRU is great because you can set the files by extension and will also auto extract rars. Set it and forget it.
So that would be just a script in Linux. Bash, the shell for the command line, allows for scripting. Its like a simple program that you can set to run at times. Might take a few tries to get it right, but a little reading and a few tries anyone could get something like that working.
Holy shit, so you can pretty much do anything? Like, if I wanted to clone a drive and have it monitored I could learn bash and write a script to, for example, at 2am every day copy all files created yesterday from here to here?
Sure, that is really the reason for scripting. They are called chron jobs, because they run on a schedule. Its a command called chrontab. Unix is all about doing things automatically. Takes a bit of time to set up, but then it does what you want, when you want it. Your going to love it once you use it.
I mean, technically they’re called cron jobs, although the name cron does come from the Greek word chronos.
That’s awesome thanks. Sounds like a not-too-hard problem I can start learning with!