Re: Lilypond & Ubuntu Help

[Jonathan Kulp]

Ah.  It never occurred to me to try to allow for anything but the 
standard "lilypond filename.ly" command.  That's a good idea.  I don't 
use anything but the standard command very often, though, so I won't 
lose any sleep over it.  I *was* prepared to lose sleep over the fact 
that the output files weren't ending up in the right directory ;-) Glad 
to have figured that one out.

I didn't even know the basename command until today when I started 
researching the problem.  I have a book to thank for that.  The book and 
the manpage for basename both mention the extension-chopping function. 
Very useful.  I was using a sed command to do that before, but I like 
basename better b/c I didn't really understand what sed was doing, I 
just copied and slightly tweaked someone else's line of code in another 
script (sort of like what we do with lilypond snippets, I guess).  The 
advantage of sed over basename for this, though, is that sed doesn't 
require you to specify exactly what the extension is that you want to 
chop off.  I tried using "basename ~/Documents/filename.ly .*" and it 
returned errors.  You have to tell it exactly what extension you want to 
extract: "basename ~/Documents/filename.ly .ly" returns "filename". 
This is fine for a script designed specifically for lilypond, but it 
would be more flexible if it allowed for a wildcard that would chop off 
whatever extension happened to be there.

The book is "Beginning Shell Scripting," by Eric Foster-Johnson, John 
Welch, and Micah Anderson.  I also have "Classic Shell Scripting," an 
O'Reilly book, but I find that Beginning Shell Scripting is better about 
explaining every detail of every example, which is important for me 
since I'm such a newb :).

Thanks for writing the script, Jay.  I'm going to study and break it 
down bit by bit to see what I can learn from it.  It works great!

Jon

Jay Anderson wrote:
> The scripts do essentially the same thing. The only thing I was trying
> to do was allow for normal lilypond command line arguments also. The
> sed line is a hack to pull out all but the last argument. It will
> break if the last argument is quoted and has a space in it.
>
> -----Jay
>
> P.S. I didn't know basename took a second argument to chop off the
> extension. Neat.

--
Jonathan Kulp
http://www.jonathankulp.com