Make sorting media files marginally easier

If you're like me, you have a hard drive with little scattered oxbow directories filled with the varied sediment of entertainment media strata.  These dark swamplands occasionally need draining and the value of each soggy log and bog frog within must be appraised.  The trick is to minimize the time required to hold one's breath.

The dominant populations one may find in such a data-wallow may include:

• product pdf's and datasheets
• books and reference documents
• videos of things exploding into flames
• good old-fashioned porn
• music videos from YouTube
• bad old-fashioned porn 
• esoteric music files from atypical sources
• graphs documenting the aggrandizement of a veiled fascism
• cat pictures

Whether it's by lack of self-discipline or because you have a good excuse, these things tend to collect and need occasional sorting and cleanup.   Some things like video and audio tend to be tedious to sort, not only because the files take time to review, but often because their sources leave them poorly named.

Recently I felt the need to abuse myself by sorting a folder full of shit video files I wasn't in the mood to watch.  It so happened that they were mostly rips from various flash players and all had meaningless hash salads for filenames.  Because of this, manually picking through each one becomes tedious.  Tab-completion is defeated; it's difficult to even remember which filename you're trying to target.  I put together a crude script to automate the review, renaming, and categorization of the ~200 files.

#!/bin/bash

SAVEIFS=$IFS
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")

if [ ! -d "funnyshit" ]; then mkdir funnyshit; fi
if [ ! -d "depressingshit" ]; then mkdir depressingshit; fi
if [ ! -d "infuriatingshit" ]; then mkdir infuriatingshit; fi
if [ ! -d "junk" ]; then mkdir junk; fi

for file in $(ls -1); do 
    echo -e "\033[0;36mPlaying: $file\033[0m " 
    mplayer $file --really-quiet
    sleep 1

    whiptail --inputbox "Filename Editor\nESC to skip this file" 8 60 "$file" 2>tname
    if [ $? != 0 ]; then 
        rm tname 
        echo -e "\033[0;36mSkipping $file\033[0m" 
        continue
    fi 
    newname=$(cat tname); rm tname

    if [ $newname != $file ]; then 
        mv $file $newname
        echo -e "\033[0;36mChanged $file to $newname\033[0m" 
        file=$newname
    else
        echo -e "\033[0;36mDid not change file name\033[0m"
    fi

    whiptail --radiolist "where to put it" 15 50 8 "funnyshit" "" on "depressingshit" "" off "infuriatingshit" "" off "junk" "" off 2>tdir
    if [ $? != 0 ]; then rm tdir; break; fi
    destination=$(cat tdir); rm tdir

    echo -e "\033[0;36mMoving $file to $destination\033[0m"
    mv $file $destination/
done

IFS=$SAVEIFS

The script just blindly picks up every file in the directory and plays it.  Non-video files can be manually skipped or sorted if they're identifiable.  Video files are played with Mplayer.  Once an evaluation is made, user hits escape to terminate Mplayer, and a dialog prompts for an optional new name and a choice of output directory bins.

There are a lot of ways to make this more flexible and useful in other tasks or with other filetypes, but I hope it's obvious by now that i don't really care any more.