MPlayer:Recursively Play All Files
==================================
:author: Aaron Ball
:email: nullspoon@iohq.net


I've researched this one before and there doesn't seem to be a real standard
for how to do this (such as a -r switch for recursive play).  Granted, when in
Linux is there a standard for something that doesn't really need to be
standardized? In Linux land, there's usually a minimum of several ways to do
something right. Figuring out newer and more efficient ways of doing things is
fun! That said, I'm going to contribute http://xkcd.com/927/[my way of doing
this] to the mix.

To do this, we are going to need a magical (ooo, shiny) bash one liner that
involves a little http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/process-sub.html[process
substitution] (ksh, sh, and csh users, sorry. Those shells don't support
process substitution).

  mplayer -playlist <(find /path/to/music -type f -name \*.ogg)

[[what-just-happened]]
What just happened?!
--------------------

What we just did there was perform process redirection. When you run the
**find /mnt/music -type...**, a process is started up. What the *<()*
around the command does is create a link to the output of the pid at
/dev/fd/63. A quick _ls -l_ will show us this.

  [nullspoon@null music]$ ls -l <(find /path/to/music/ -name \*.ogg)
  lr-x------ 1 nullspoon nullspoon 64 Jun 14 10:00 /dev/fd/63 -> pipe:[59723]

If you want to see the contents of that file, you can simply just run the find
command without anything else. If you want to see it in vim like you're editing
it, replace _mplayer -playlist_ with __vim__. This will be like running +vim
/dev/fd/63+.

  vim <(find /path/to/music -type f -name \*.ogg)

Now, if you realy wanted to get crazy, you could change append to the
find command a bit to listen only to music with names that have a 7 in
them.

  mplayer -playlist <(find /path/to/music/ -name \*.ogg | grep 7)

... Or sort our music backwards?

  mplayer -playlist <(find /path/to/music/ -name \*.ogg | sort -r)

... Or a random sort?!

  mplayer -playlist <(find /path/to/music/ -name \*.ogg | sort -R)

The last one is kind of pointless since mplayer has a *-shuffle* switch.  I
guess you could combine the two and get _doubly_ shuffled music! I think Chef
Elzar would have something to say about that. "BAM!!!"



// vim: set syntax=asciidoc: