Fledge

Introducing Fledge, a file processing language/shell written in Python. I wrote it for two reasons: first, as an experiment with an idea that I’ll explain in a moment, and second, because I can’t for the life of me ever remember how to do batch find-and-replace in text files on the command line. (And yes, I could have written a script to help me with the latter. In fact, I did. I just can’t ever remember what it’s called. I … may have issues.)

Anyway, the idea is that you select the files first, then execute one or more actions on them, rather than the normal way round. For example:

with my-book.text
split on /CHAPTER/ to chapter-%%.text
replace /CHAPTER/Chapter/
trim

That splits my-book.text out on a regex to chapter-01.text, chapter-02.text, etc., does a batch find-and-replace on all those chapter files, and then trims them of whitespace at the beginning and end of each file. The alternative would be something like this, assuming you had split, replace, and trim scripts:

$ split my-book.text "/CHAPTER/" "chapter-%%.text"
$ replace chapter-*.text "/CHAPTER/Chapter/"
$ trim chapter-*.text

So, instead of having to specify which files you’re working on at every step of the way, with Fledge you just do it at the beginning and that selection is used for whatever subsequent actions you perform.

Some more examples

with *.jpg where size != 0
rename page-%%%.text starting with 0

This gets all the non-zero image files in the directory and renames them sequentially to page-000.jpg, page-001.jpg, etc.

alias {mtp} ~/Documents/mtp
with **/*.jpg
convert to png
deselect DSC*
move to {mtp}

This finds all the JPEG files recursively under the current directory, converts them to PNG, deselects everything that starts with DSC, and moves the rest of the PNGs to ~/Documents/mtp.

More about Fledge

The fl script can either execute a script of Fledge actions contained in a file or, if you run it without arguments, it loads an interactive shell.

There are a number of built-in Fledge actions (listed in the README), mostly geared towards working with text and image files, but you can write custom actions (which live in ~/.fledge/actions) to do pretty much anything. (Keeping in mind that in general these would be things you want to do to a large number of files.)

How I’m using it

I use it to help prep image scans of journals and personal histories and stuff to upload to Unbindery for transcription (which, incidentally, I’ve been thinking about paring down to a much simpler, more focused app aimed at family history transcription). I also use it for ebook production (splitting Project Gutenberg files into chapters to be made into EPUBs, doing batch substitutions, etc.) and for Mormon Artist (resizing and renaming images, mostly).

So far, I like it. It’s still very much a work in progress (as I write this I’m realizing rename probably should be rename to for consistency), but I can actually remember these commands. And for situations where I’m doing a lot of sequential actions on multiple files (as in ebook production), it’s nice not having to re-specify everything every step.