Shell file parsing to automate youtube uploads - linux

Question

I was writing a small script to mass upload videos to youtube.. It looks like this:
#! /bin/sh
python --version
for file in ./*.mp4 ; do
export title=$(basename "$file" ".mp4")
echo $title "for" $file
youtube-upload -m mail#mailer.com -p pass -c Category -t "$title" -d "description" "$file"
done
Where youtube-upload is a cli based python uploader..
My question is as you can see i'm taking the title from the file name path, and the description is always the same :(. I want to write the description into a text or xml file parse it, and then upload with a proper description for each file..
How to do this using shell commands in this context?
Thanks for your suggestions

Answer 1

Have one file containing all of your filename->description mappings:
my file.mp4 this is a description
file2.mp4 this is another description
my last file.mp4 this is a description
ilied.mp4 description
And then just grab the line beginning with the filename and use the rest of the line:
#! /bin/sh
python --version
for file in ./*.mp4 ; do
export title=$(basename "$file" ".mp4")
echo $title "for" $file
youtube-upload -m mail#mailer.com -p pass -c Category -t "$title" -d "$(grep "^$(basename "$file")" desc | sed 's/.*.mp4 //')" "$file"
done
Looking at what's in the $(...):
grep "^$(basename "$file")" desc | sed 's/.*.mp4 //'
The grep finds the line that starts with the basename($file) in the "desc" file and then uses sed to get rid of the filename, leaving the rest of the line (which would be the description).
Note that this doesn't need to be a part of the youtube-upload comand line. You can also toss it into a variable:
#! /bin/sh
python --version
for file in ./*.mp4 ; do
export title=$(basename "$file" ".mp4")
echo $title "for" $file
description=$(grep "^$(basename "$file")" desc | sed 's/.*.mp4 //')
youtube-upload -m mail#mailer.com -p pass -c Category -t "$title" -d "$description" "$file"
done