Prateek Punetha

Back to Bash: Reflections on Filtering Wikipedia Episode Links a Year Later

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

How I Extracted TV Episode Titles Using Command Line Magic

I enjoy watching TV shows and prefer to torrent them for offline viewing. The issue is that these shows often have strange names that don’t make sense and can be difficult to keep track of, especially since various individuals and groups post them on torrent sites. While I can use Wikipedia to obtain the actual episode names, manually copying and renaming each episode can be time-consuming. Therefore, I decided to automate the process using command-line tools and Ranger’s bulk renaming feature.

The Problem

First, I needed to find a way to scrape the episode title from a Wikipedia page. After some research, I discovered that the best way to do this was to download the page’s source code and then extract the relevant information using a tool like grep.

The Solution

I started by writing a simple curl command that would download the source code of the Wikipedia page for a given TV show:

curl -s "$1?action=raw"

This command uses the -s flag to suppress the output of curl, and $1 is the URL of the Wikipedia page. The ?action=raw part of the URL ensures that we get the raw source code of the page, rather than the formatted HTML.

Next, I needed to extract the episode title from the source code. After looking through the code, I found that each episode title was surrounded by a tag that looked like this:

== "Title" ==

To extract this information, I used grep to search for the tag and then extracted the episode title using sed. Here’s the final command:

curl -s "$1?action=raw" | grep -B10 'ShortSummary' | grep -w 'Title' | sed 's/.*Title.*= //' | nl -w6 -w1 -s " - "

Let’s break this command down:

bash curl -s "$1?action=raw"downloads the source code of the Wikipedia page.
grep -B10 'ShortSummary'searches for the line that contains the string “ShortSummary” and returns the 10 lines before it.
grep -w 'Title' searches for the line that contains the word “Title” and returns it.
sed 's/.*Title.*= //' removes everything before the episode title.
nl -w6 -w1 -s " - " adds numbering to the output. With this command, I could simply pass in the URL of a TV show’s Wikipedia page, and it would return a numbered list of all the episode titles.

Then, I can simply copy these names and use Ranger’s bulk rename feature to rename them.

Conclusion

Through some trial and error, I was able to come up with a simple command-line script that makes my life a little bit easier. I’m excited to keep exploring new ways to use command-line tools to solve everyday problems.

Link to the script

I hope you found this post helpful, and feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or feedback!

Updating My ThinkPad BIOS from Linux

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

About a year ago, I got a ThinkPad E14 Gen 2 (Ryzen) and wanted to update its BIOS.

However, I didn’t want to install Windows just to update the BIOS. After some research online, I discovered that Lenovo releases BIOS updates for ThinkPad in two formats - one is through the Bios Update Utility (Windows), which is a .exe file, and the other is a .iso file that can be flashed through a USB thumb drive.

Here’s how to update the BIOS under Linux:

Get the latest version of the BIOS in .iso format for your model from the Lenovo support site.
Download geteltorito, a Perl script that extracts the boot image from the bios.iso file. You can grab it from here.
Extract the boot image from the bios.iso file (in my case, the file was r1auj38wd.iso) using the command $ geteltorito.pl -o bios_update.img r1auj38wd.iso.
Copy the image to USB using the dd command: $ sudo dd if=bios_update.img of=/dev/sda. Note that you should replace /dev/sda with the corresponding device name for your system.
Boot from your USB drive, follow the instructions, and update the BIOS.

At first, I was nervous about what would happen if anything went wrong, but everything worked out just fine :)

Software I Use

Wed, 14 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Operating System

Arch Linux with BSPWM Tiling Window Manager.

Terminal

Kitty: Just a terminal emulator with images and Unicode support.

Shell

zsh: I use zsh as a shell, because of features like plugins, spelling correction, and approximate completion. I don’t mind using other shells though, as on my server I use bash.

I only use vanilla zsh, with my configs. I don’t use oh my zsh because it is slow and has unnecessary stuff which I don’t need.

Text Editing & Programming

vim/Neovim: vim is a incredibly powerful and efficient text editor. The amount of stuff I’ve done in record time using vim is staggering.

Web Browser

Ungoogled Chromium: Chromium based web browser with google components and blobs removed. I use it with extensions like uBlock Origin, Vimium etc.

File Manager

ranger: A highly configurable file manager, with vi key bindings and other cool stuff.

Image Viewer

sxiv: A hacker-friendly scriptable image viewer. It also supports animated GIFs, thumbnails, and slideshows.

Document Viewer

zathura: zathura is a minimal yet highly customizable plugin-based document viewer. If you want to make it read pdf, you’ll need a plugin for that and the same goes for other types of doucments like ps, epub etc.

Previously I used to use xreader, but now I’ve switched to zathura, because it just works the way I want it to be.

Media Player

mpv: Neat and simple interface video player which works perfectly with a wide variety of video formats and has all the customizations I need.

Email

neomutt: Simple yet powerful terminal based email client.

Sync

syncthing: Serverless device syncing.

RSS

newsboat: A simple RSS feed reader for the terminal.

Other

rtorrent: BitTorrent client.
aria2: All-in-one downloading tool.
ffmpeg: General purpose command-line tool for video and audio recording, and conversion. I mainly use it for adding subs to video files, concatenation, and cropping.
ImageMagick: I use it to edit, convert, resize or rotate images.
rclone: Command line program for managing files over cloud storage. Yes, a Swiss army knife of cloud storage.
youtube-dl: CLI tool for downloading youtube videos. Can download youtube playlists or even an entire youtube channel. It also supports downloading from many other websites. Technically, I use yt-dlp these days, because it has some additional features and it also fixes problems like buffering with mpv that I face with regular ytdl.

My attempt at a blog

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Previously, I had a website based on Jekyll, but I didn’t post much on it. Later, I realized that I come across a lot of new things each day. It would be a good idea if I shared what I learned. Not only will it help me with future references, but others as well.

I intend to write about all topics that interest me, in no particular order:

Linux System Administration
Self-hosting and similar stuff
Things I Use (Software, Hardware)
Shows: I watch a lot of shows, although I don’t binge-watch. I think I will talk about them as well.

I hope you will enjoy it.

About Me

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hi there

My name is Prateek Punetha. I am 22 years old. Originally I am from Uttarakhand, India. I am very keen on anything related to computers and technology. I am currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from Maharashtra, India.

Contacting Me

You can contact me using the following means:

Telegram
Email me at hi (at) prateekpunetha dot dev

For maximum privacy and security you can encrypt your messages with my public key.