Up!

Like many other scripts, the bash shell function "up" is a by product of my laziness. As the name vaguely indicates, it can move you up in the directory tree. If you want to move 3 levels up in the directory tree, you invoke the function as up 3 instead of cd ../../../  which saves a ton of typing. The shell function can be downloaded from my GitHub repo. 

# Go n level up in the directory structure.
# License : GPLv3
function up ()
{
        lvls=""
        if [[ ! -z "$1" ]]
        then
                for i in `seq $1`
                do
                        lvls="${lvls}../"
                done
        else
                lvls="../"
        fi

        # Will land up in / if n is too large.
        cd ${lvls}
        pwd
}

The ShellUtils repo contains few other shell scripts that might be interesting. See the Readme file in the repo to find out what those scripts are doing.

Dbus-MPRIS Music Player Controller

The Short story :

Here is a shell script that can control media players like Amarok, Clementine, mpd & VLC : https://github.com/primejyothi/Dbus-MPRIS-MusicPlayer-Controller

The long story :

Like most of the programmers, I'm a big fan of command line. Since I can touch type, things get done really faster. There will be a music player running in my system and most of the time I will be using mpd with ncmpcpp. Only problem is that I keep forget which key is used to stop/pause ncmpcpp. This problem was quickly resolved by installing mpc and few aliases. Things were pretty fine and I even wrote a script (https://github.com/primejyothi/ShellUtils/blob/master/mpdLyrics.sh) to extract the album art of the song being played in mpd and show it on Conky .

Problems cropped up when Amarok or Clementine were used. The controls were on top for Amarok and in case of Clementine it was just opposite. I could use the media keys in the keyboard, but I hardly use them as mpd does not respond to them. The search of consistency ended with MPRIS. Quickly put together a script and any of these media players could be controlled with a single script. Few aliases and I can control the media player without leaving vim :)

For VLC and mpd, MPRIS need to be enabled manually. The VLC player need to be started as vlc --control dbus. In case of mpd, mpDris2 need to be running.