Repeat Bash Prompts

By  on  

I'm sure you wont be surprised when I tell you it's my job to automate things in our my household.  My wife is tech savvy but she relies on me to make tech matters easy for everyone; I guess it's flattering that she trusts me to do that.  One easy task she's trusted me with is make it easy to grab music from YouTube so she can put it on her phone or rock to on AudioShield.  I could probably point her to numerous sites that do that conversion but most are filled with disgusting ads and malware.  Since I love youtube-dl, I set out to create a bash script my wife could use to download as much music as she wanted!

Almost a decade ago I wrote about using a text file to download with youtube-dl but even that's a bit annoying for most people.  I could make a web interface but that seemed like too much I created a bash script to repeatedly ask for a YouTube link which to download and convert to MP3:

while true; do
    read -p "What is the YouTube link? " answer
    youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 $answer
done;

The script repeatedly asks for a YouTube link, downloads and converts to mp3, then asks for YouTube link again.  I created a desktop shortcut for this script to make usage even easier.  An easy script to make music download easy!

Of course the script could use some validation (i.e. that it's a link from YouTube) but I trust that we'll paste a valid link.  The key takeaway is that while true; do ...done will allow you to create repeated loop in a bash script!

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?

    How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps? This article serves as a point-by-point...

  • By
    Being a Dev Dad

    I get asked loads of questions every day but I'm always surprised that they're rarely questions about code or even tech -- many of the questions I get are more about non-dev stuff like what my office is like, what software I use, and oftentimes...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Introducing MooTools HeatMap

    It's often interesting to think about where on a given element, whether it be the page, an image, or a static DIV, your users are clicking.  With that curiosity in mind, I've created HeatMap: a MooTools class that allows you to detect, load, save, and...

  • By
    Animated AJAX Record Deletion Using jQuery

    I'm a huge fan of WordPress' method of individual article deletion. You click the delete link, the menu item animates red, and the item disappears. Here's how to achieve that functionality with jQuery JavaScript. The PHP - Content & Header The following snippet goes at the...

Discussion

  1. test
    
    
    • test

      adsadsad

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!