August 25, 2008

Removing EXIF data with find and jhead

Let’s imagine you’ve got a load of pictures on a *nix box somewhere, and you’d prefer they didn’t have EXIF data attached? You’d need a way to find all the jpeg files and a way to strip their EXIF data. Thankfully, both tasks are easily solved, one with find and one with jhead.

Using jhead

A look at the jhead page shows the --purejpg argument will strip any EXIF data.

Building the find query

We need to find files who’s name ends in .jpg, .jpeg, .JPG, or .JPEG in a given directory tree. A quick look at the find man page shows us the -iregex parameter accepts a case insensitive regexp. .*\.jpe?g$ looks for the following parameters:

  • .* - any number of characters
  • .jp - the literal characters . j and p
  • e? - one or no e characters.
  • g - a litteral g character
  • $ - and these must all be at the very end of the string

The parameter -exec will execute a command on any matching files, substituting the actual filename for {}, and we must end the command with a ;.

The final command

find . -iregex '.*\.jpe?g$' -exec jhead -purejpg '{}' \;

This will find any file with a .jpg or .jpeg extension (in any case) in the current directory (recursively) and strip it’s exif data.

One step further

Maybe you didn’t name all your JPEG files something.jpg. Maybe you named them foo_picture; how ever will you find them? Enter the unix ‘file’ command, it reads a files contents and looks for keys to it’s file type. We’ll use it here to build a command that searches the tree looking for files that look like binary jpeg files.

  • find . -type f -exec file -i -F \0 '{}' \; - Find actual files (-type f) and execute the file command on them, but set file to seperate it’s data with NULLs (since you’re unlikely to have a NULL in your filename) and output the results as a mime type (because it’s easier to parse later).
  • awk -F\0 '$2 == " image/jpeg" {printf "%s\0",$1}' - use awk to check the type feild for the jpeg mime type, then only print the file path (followed by a NULL).
  • xargs -0 -n 1 jhead -purejpg - use xargs to split the input on NULLs and feed one path at a time to the jhead command.

Putting it all togeather, we get find . -type f -exec file -i -F \0 '{}' \;|awk -F\0 '$2 == " image/jpeg" {printf "%s\0",$1}'|xargs -0 -n 1 jhead -purejpg

This is, of course, much slower than the pattern matching find command above.

 time find ./public_html/ -type f -exec file -i -F \0 '{}' \; \
    |awk -F\0 '$2 == " image/jpeg" {printf "%s\0",$1}'|xargs -0 -n 1 jhead -purejpg
 real    0m21.299s
 user    0m4.214s
 sys     0m16.290s

 time find ./public_html/ -iregex '.*\.jpe?g$' -exec jhead -purejpg '{}' \;
 real    0m7.819s
 user    0m0.548s
 sys     0m2.565s

And that’s after the entire directory tree has been pulled into memory cache!

Posted by spiffed at 2:33 PM | Comments (0)

August 20, 2008

Unfreezing Screen

I’m sure many people have done this: typed a command, then realized they’ll need root, so they hit ctrl-a for the beginning of the line, then started typing sudo. And this works wonderfully, unless your in a screen session, in which case it locks up completely.

From the screen manpage we see that ctrl-a puts screen into command mode, and the s of sudo sends an ‘xoff’ to the terminal.

What does xoff do? It’s a control signal in xon/xoff handshaking that says ‘stop sending data to me’, so the machine stops sending your terminal data.

To get your screen session back, send ctrl-a then q. This sends the matching xon. Xon ofcourse says ‘go ahead, send data, I’m ready’.

To avoid the issue in the first place, use ctrl-a followed by a to jump to the beginning of the line.

Posted by spiffed at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2008

Printing Canada Post CN22 Labels

If you do alot of cross-border shipping, you no doubt have a whack of CN22 customs forms to fill-out everyday. This template should make your life just a little easier.

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Posted by spiffed at 2:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

March 12, 2008

DIY Antistatic wrap

Some people are more resourceful then others. I received these as a return, complete with tin-foil/aluminium-foil to fight static (or ward off mind rays?).

Posted by spiffed at 11:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 3, 2008

Packaging and Shipping eBay Items.

This is a short tutorial on going from PayPal payment emails to packaged products.

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Posted by spiffed at 2:28 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (2)

February 26, 2008

Markdown and flickrnotes

Markdown makes writing in Movable Type painless and flickrnotes makes embedding flickr images relatively easy, but together, they make embedding flickr images completely painless.

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Posted by spiffed at 1:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)