Linux And Free Software Tips, Tricks And Tutorials, fun with Free Software Options

[hildebrand]

I am starting this thread with a long term perspective to put together lots of useful information for our programs.
Request all to participate in this thread to spread the word about all the lovely things that can be done on Linux.

The distribution I use is Debian (from www.debian.org) but most tricks shall be generic in nature (program based). Many of the softwares are available on windows also so some tips maybe applicable for their windows versions also.

This post has been edited by hildebrand: Oct 10 2009, 07:19 PM

[hildebrand]

Tip #7: extract utility (which uses libextractor)

Similar to the well-known "file" command, extract can display meta-data from a
file and print the results to stdout.
.
Currently, libextractor supports the following formats: HTML, PDF, PS, OLE2
(DOC, XLS, PPT), OpenOffice (sxw), StarOffice (sdw), DVI, MAN, MP3 (ID3v1 and
ID3v2), OGG, WAV, EXIV2, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, DEB, RPM, TAR(.GZ), ZIP, ELF,
REAL, RIFF (AVI), MPEG, QT and ASF.
.
Also, various additional MIME types are detected. It can also be used to
compute hash functions (SHA-1, MD5, ripemd160).
Homepage: http://www.gnunet.org/libextractor/

Its syntax is extract -f <filename>

Admittedly, it works tag2 although with no extra details (auto-generated from the tag) which it seems to give with version 1.

The below output shows details for a file with both v1 and v2 tags (which are identical)

CODE

extract -f comment diwaliphiraagayi_shamshad.mp3
duration - 2m26
format - MPEG-1 Layer III audio, 128 kbps (CBR), 44100 Hz, stereo, no copyright, original
resource-type - MPEG-1
mimetype - audio/mpeg
description - Shamshad: Diwali Phir Aa Gayi (Khazanchi)
track number - 1
comment - MD- Ghulam Haider
genre - Oldies
year - 1941
album - Khazanchi
artist - Shamshad
title - Diwali Phir Aa Gayi
content type - (11)
filesize - 2.34 MB
filename - diwaliphiraagayi_shamshad.mp3

Following is output with a file with tag of v2 only which shows everything but the extra stuff disappears (probably not coded for). In general though, I feel its a good practice to keep both tags.

CODE

extract -f diwaliphiraagayi_shamshad.mp3
year - 1941
album - Khazanchi
artist - Shamshad
title - Diwali Phir Aa Gayi
mimetype - audio/mpeg
filesize - 2.34 MB
filename - diwaliphiraagayi_shamshad.mp3