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Jindur

Member

Registered: 2011-09-29

Posts: 184

[SOLVED] A small problem with command-line arguments

whenever I call VLC I want to add a parameter by default, namely

--codec crystalhd

.
So what I did is renamed the VLC binary to vlc.2.1.0 and added a shell script 'vlc' instead that calls it.

It just looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
vlc.2.1.0 --codec crystalhd $*

The problem however is that this will cause vlc to throw an error when the filename contains spaces!
So next I tried this modification of above script:

#!/bin/bash
vlc.2.1.0 --codec crystalhd "$*"

Indeed this works again since the filename will be enclosed in quotes, however now a new problem arises:
If the script itself is called with additional parameters besides the filename, those will also be placed into those quotes, which of course won't work! Eg:

$ vlc --parm x file\ name\ with\ spaces

will obviously call:

vlc.2.1.0 --codec crystalhd "--parm x file name with spaces"

Isn't there a way to just simply pass the string of command-line arguments AS IS directly to the vlc.2.1.0 call without need for quotes or processing being done on its escape sequences or anything?
Any help appreciated.

Last edited by Jindur (2012-03-01 14:19:26)

Vain

Member

Registered: 2008-10-19

Posts: 179

Website

Re: [SOLVED] A small problem with command-line arguments

Hi,

you should use "$@" instead of "$*" (and not "*$", btw). And don’t forget the quotes.

See also: http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual … Parameters

---

Why "Open Source" misses the point of Free Software

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,522

Website

Re: [SOLVED] A small problem with command-line arguments

Is there a reason for a script rather than an alias?

#in bashrc
alias vlc='vlc --codec crystalhd'

This is much cleaner, and will not be broken by every update of vlc,

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

Jindur

Member

Registered: 2011-09-29

Posts: 184

Re: [SOLVED] A small problem with command-line arguments

Awesome, thanks guys. Well I'm not that familiar with bash script as you can see. Actually I know about aliases (using some for extended 'ls') but didn't think of it at all here, probably due to lack of routine I guess. ^^'

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: [SOLVED] A small problem with command-line arguments

Please remember to mark the thread as solved :-)