Tutorials on Bash

Commonly, we process JSON data by writing a program to load, deserialize and manipulate this data. Depending on the programming language, this program may require an additional compilation step before being executed within a terminal. For simple operations, such as filtering and mapping, we don't need to write an additional program to perform these operations on our JSON data. Rather, we can directly manipulate our JSON data within a terminal via the jq command-line utility, which allows the editing of streamed JSON data without an interactive text editor interface (" sed for JSON"). If you're looking for a tool to retrieve JSON data from an API endpoint, process this data and save the result to a CSV, TSV or JSON file, then jq easily accomplishes this task in a single-line command. Below, I'm going to show you how to process JSON data with jq .

Disclaimer - If you are unfamiliar with FFmpeg, then please read this blog post before proceeding. When you upload a video to a platform such as Youtube , you can select and add a custom thumbnail image to display within its result item. Amongst the many recommended videos, a professionally-made thumbnail captures the attention of undecided users and improves the chances of your video being played. At a low-level, a thumbnail consists of an image, a title and a duration (placed within a faded black box and fixed to the lower-right corner): To generate a thumbnail from a video with ffmpeg :

Online streaming and multimedia content platforms garner a large audience and consume a disproportionate amount of bandwidth compared to other types of platforms. These platforms rely on content creators to upload, share and promote their videos and music. To process and polish video and audio files, both professionals and amateurs automatically resort to using interactive software, such as Adobe Premiere. Such software features many tools to unleash the creativity of its users, but each comes with its own set of entry barriers (learning curve and pricing) and unique workflows for editing tasks. For example, in Adobe Premiere , to manually concatenate footage together, you create a nested sequence, which involves several steps of creating sequences and dragging and dropping clips into a workspace's timeline. If you produce lots of content weekly for a platform, such as YouTube, and work on a tight schedule that leaves no extra time for video editing, then you may consider hiring a devoted video editor to handle the video editing for you. Fortunately, you can develop a partially autonomous workflow for video editing by offloading certain tedious tasks to FFmpeg. FFmpeg is a cross-platform, open-source library for processing multimedia content (e.g., videos, images and audio files) and converting between different video formats (i.e., MP4 to WebM ). Commonly, developers use FFmpeg via the ffmpeg CLI tool, but there are language-specific bindings written for FFmpeg to import it as a package/dependency into your project/s. With ffmpeg , Bash scripts can automate your workflow with simple, single-line commands, whether it is making montages, replacing a video's audio with stock background music or streamlining bulk uploads. This either significantly reduces or completely eliminates your dependence on a user interface to manually perform these tasks by moving around items, clicking buttons, etc.

If you work within a disorganized workspace with deeply nested folders and try locating a specific folder, file or code snippet, then your productivity suffers from the constant distraction of manually searching through the workspace. Navigating the workspace and rummaging through every folder (double-clicking each one) to find a single folder or file becomes repetitive and directs attention away from your work. If you forget to close the folders after exploring them, then these opened folders accumulate over time and obstruct subsequent searches by cluttering the screen. Additionally, a computer's file explorer, such as Mac's Finder or Ubuntu's Nautilus, slows down when loading and displaying folders and files within large external hard-drives, thumb drives or SD cards filled (or nearly filled) to maximum capacity. Operating systems based on the UNIX kernel provide the find and grep command-line utilities to search for files/folders and text within a file respectively via pattern matching. With a single-line command, you avoid interacting with the interface of the computer's file explorer. Instead, the command prints the search results to standard output ( stdout ) displayed within the terminal. Both the find and grep commands are considered as some of the most essential building blocks in bash scripting! Knowing how to use them allows you to integrate them into your continuous integration (CI) pipeline to automate search tasks. Below, I'm going to show you: