Entries tagged scripting

Recently I've been producing simple Flash animations.

Mostly these are simple "Show an image, slide it around a bit, show another..". But I still feel vaguely unclean and non-free.

I started off using the SWF Perl binding, but soon realised that wasn't much fun. So I wrote a mini intepretter such that I can script creation:

#!/usr/bin/flash-scripter

# create the movie
create 640 480

# background == black
clear 0, 0, 0

# load image at 0,0
load 0, 0, foo.png

# move it about a bit
move 0, -1
move 0, -1
move 0, -1

# movie-time is over now.
stop

# finally save the movie
save foo.swf

# all done
exit

I see I'm not alone in doing such a thing as swftools (not available for Debian) includes swfc "A tool for creating SWF files from simple script files.". Sadly swftools fails to build for me on Squeeze so I couldn't try it out.

My little tool is called SWF::Scripter and uses plugins to implement each "command" so I should probably upload it somewhere public. On the other hand it was a quick hack to produce a mini-story from a bunch of images with no complex transitions so I'm not sure it is worth the effort.

ObQuote: "I honestly think I'd give up smoking if he asked me." - Breakfast at Tiffany's

Tags: cpan, flash, perl, scripting | 7 comments

I started work on sysbox again recently, adding a couple of simple utilities. (The whole project is a small collection of utilities, distributed as a single binary to ease installation.)

Imagine you want to run a command for every line of STDIN, here's a good example:

 $ cat input | sysbox exec-stdin "youtube-dl {}"

Here you see for every (non-empty) line of input read from STDIN the command "youtube-dl" has been executed. "{}" gets expanded to the complete line read. You can also access individual fields, kinda like awk.

(Yes youtube-dl can read a list of URLs from a file, this is an example!)

Another example, run groups for every local user:

$ cat /etc/passwd | sysbox exec-stdin --split=: groups {1}

Here you see we have split the input-lines read from STDIN by the : character, instead of by whitespace, and we've accessed the first field via "{1}". This is certainly easier for scripting than using a bash loop.

On the topic of bash; command-completion for each subcommand, and their arguments, is now present:

$ source <(sysbox bash-completion)

And I've added a text-based UI for selecting files. You can also execute a command, against the selected file:

$ sysbox choose-file -exec "xine {}" /srv/tv

This is what that looks like:

You'll see:

• A text-box for filtering the list.
• A list which can be scrolled up/down/etc.
• A brief bit of help information in the footer.

As well as choosing files, you can also select from lines read via STDIN, and you can filter the command in the same way as before. (i.e. "{}" is the selected item.)

Other commands received updates, so the calculator now allows storing results in variables:

$ sysbox calc
calc> let a = 3
3
calc> a / 9 * 3
1
calc> 1 + 2 * a
7
calc> 1.2 + 3.4
4.600000

Tags: golang, scripting, sysadmin, sysbox | 2 comments