File rearranging script.

August 11th, 2006, 12:58 pm Josh Houghtelin C++, Tech, Work, Code

The huge downfall of scripting languages (for me) is that they require every computer they are run on to have the interpreter installed or I have to jump through a hundred loops to get the script to compile as an executable. For that reason (and because I have two weeks of downtime now) I am porting as many of my scripts as I can over to C/C++. I just spent the last 4 hours (I know, I’m lame) hacking together the most frequently used script. *drum role please* Here it is.

GEMS File Rearranging Script.

What it does: In all simplicity it just moves and renames files. We have to produce audio for the blind people who vote on the touch screen voting equipment. It’s easiest for us to label it like so:

R10.wav — the race audio w/10 being the race ID number.
R10_10.wav – the first candidate w/10 being the candidate ID number.
R10_20.wav – the second candidate w/20 being the candidate ID number.

This allows us to keep everything in order and burn audio CD’s to ship to our customers so they can proof the audio for pronunciation and whatnot. All in all having everything ordered like that just makes our life 100x easier. The script which was initially 15 lines of PHP simply rearranged all the audio so GEMS (the proprietary software used to program the machines for the election) could import the audio. It goes a little something like this:

R10.wav – stays the same.
R10_10.wav – this gets changed to 10.wav and gets placed in the newly created folder 10. The folder represents the race id number and the filename within it represents the candidate ID.
R10_20.wav – this gets changed to 20.wav and gets placed in folder “10”. And so on.

Here is the source code.
Here is the binary compiled by Bloodshed Dev-C++.

I’m far from a C coder so don’t be too much of an asshole if you see how bad my code is. Some constructive criticism would be nice though. I know I completely slaughtered the source but it’s cool to have an interperter independant executable. If you are good at C/C++ I would realy enjoy seeing how your source code for this would work.

One script down.. A whole shitload to go.