Useful script for unrar files in multiple directories

A friend of mine recently asked me to help with a problem he had. When he downloaded files from the internet, no doubt legitimate, many of them contained nested directories with an rar file and associated components in them. Some of these downloads look like this (for example):

• Main Folder
• Sub-Folder 1
• Sub-Folder 2
• Sub-Folder n etc

This is really tedious to go through each sub-folder and unrar each archive so I wrote a simple script for him to run straight from the linux/*BSD command line:

angus@server: ~# directory=/path/to/directory ; for dir in $( ls $directory ) ; do cd $dir ; unrar e *.rar ; cp *.avi /path/to/end/directory ; cd .. ; done

It seems to work relatively well. An expansion of this as a bash script:

#!/bin/bash

# Script to extract RAR files downloaded in torrents - usually TV series type torrents

# This is the directory your torrents are downloaded to

echo "Please input torrent directory: "

read -r "input_torrent"

echo "$input_torrent"

# This is the directory you want the extracted files to be copied to

echo "Please input directory for extraction: "

read -r "output_dir"

echo "$output_dir" 

#enable for loops over items with spaces in their name

IFS=$'\n'

for dir in `find "$input_torrent" -type d`

do

        cd $dir

        # ls # uncomment this line and comment the two lines below for testing

        unrar e *.part001.rar #or this can be unrar e *.rar

        cp *.avi "$output_dir"

        cd ..

done

Notes about this script:

• unrar e *.part001.rar
• I've found that this may need to be altered dependent on my friend's torrents. The directory may have the files set up in a similar pattern to this above: file.partXXX.rar OR also commonly found is file.XXX with a file.rar that is the key file to the archive
• The input_torrent and output_dir variables need to be written without backslashes i.e.
• /path/to/files with a space in the name
• NOT /path/to/files\ with\ a\ space\ in\ the\ name as you would usually expect in a *nix environment
• This is because I'm learning bash scripting and making things all neat and tidy is more than I'm capable of doing :-)
• It's set up to copy the extracted avi file elsewhere

The bit of the script between the "do" and the "done" can be modified to do different things which might be handy for you down the track.

Modify as you require and drop a comment if you have anything to add to the script!

AB out.