File Mannagement and Selective Playing with mpg123

[Tim Chase]

On 12/29/2010 09:43 PM, RiverWind wrote:
> Ok, so how do you distinguish between soft and hard lynx? I thought
> there was only one sort. When using lynx, I simply type "lynx"
> followed by an url or directory name.

Sorry for the confusion...my initial reply referred to 
"lynx-the-cat" (L Y N X) which is a console web-browser.  My 
follow-up post (sorry, I didn't copy the mailing-list on that 
reply) referred to links (L I N K S, as in a chain) which 
confusingly is *also* a console browser, but in the context of my 
email refers to a file-system element that allows you to have one 
copy of the data on your hard-drive, and references to it from 
one or more other places.  These are created with the "ln" command.

So my suggestion was to create a playlist folder somewhere and 
then link ("ln") the files you want into that folder from 
wherever they are.

My somewhat confusing command is some intermediate-level 
command-shell utilization which uses a "for" loop at the 
command-line.  Assuming you have a folder named ~/playlist and 
are currently in the directory containing all your mp3s, you can 
use this lengthy command to create the links for the files you 
specify in the file-list (in this example, file[1-3].mp3)

for fname in file1.mp3 file2.mp3 file3.mp3 ; do ln -s "${fname}" 
~/playlist ; done

This is the same as just issuing

   ln -s file1.mp3 ~/playlist
   ln -s file2.mp3 ~/playlist
   ln -s file3.mp3 ~/playlist

but without all the redundant typing which becomes annoying for 
more than a couple files.

But then you do understand correctly that you should be able to 
just issue

   mpg123 ~/playlist/*.mp3

to play that custom directory of links-to-mp3-files.

Hope that makes more sense (especially clearing up the overabuse 
of the term "links"/"lynx")

-tim