CODEWITHSUNDEEP
shellapplescriptautoit
chinna_82
chinna_82

Reputation: 6403

AutoIT - How to run shell script

I managed to run below shell script code in applescript and the outpur generated correctly.
Shell Script. 

do shell script "mdls 'UAT.pdf' | grep 'kMDItemPageWidth\\|kMDItemPageHeight' | awk '/ = / {for (i = 3; i <= NF; i++) printf \"%s \", $i/72; printf \"\\n\";}'"

The script basically, read PDF document properties.

How do I run this in AutoIT. Any reference or advice is highly appreciated.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 538

Answers (1)

CRGreen
CRGreen

Reputation: 3429

Now we're getting somewhere! @chinna_82, This is what I advise. Meaning, this is the way I would do it (I have ported a couple of scripts to AutoIt and built an installer using AutoIt. It's pretty great):

1) The least portable part of this is the mdls command, which is unix/OSX only, there is no Windows version, but there may be Windows alternatives. More on that in a bit....

2) All grep and awk are doing is parsing what mdls returns for output. This can be done in a number of ways, including just coding it in AutoIt. Yes, if I were doing this, I could find Windows versions or alternatives to grep and awk (windows grep and gawk, for example), but they are doing relatively simple things, and I might just do that in AutoIt (for learning AutoIt's language, see http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/docs/). It's probably not worth finding the exact Windows versions of grep and awk -- just use AutoIt's own language for that.

Anyway, mdls grabs all the pdf's metadata. It is text like:

kMDItemAuthors                 = (
    "Flint, Herbert L. (Herbert Longley), b. 1862"
)
kMDItemContentCreationDate     = 2013-10-16 16:07:51 -0700
kMDItemContentModificationDate = 2013-10-16 16:07:52 -0700
kMDItemContentType             = "com.adobe.pdf"
kMDItemContentTypeTree         = (
    "com.adobe.pdf",
    "public.data",
    "public.item",
    "public.composite-content",
    "public.content"
)
kMDItemCreator                 = "Digitized by the Internet Archive"
kMDItemDisplayName             = "practicalinstruc00flin.pdf"
kMDItemEncodingApplications    = (
    "Recoded by LuraDocument PDF v2.53"
)
kMDItemFSContentChangeDate     = 2013-10-16 16:07:52 -0700
kMDItemFSCreationDate          = 2013-10-16 16:07:51 -0700
kMDItemFSCreatorCode           = ""
kMDItemFSFinderFlags           = 0
kMDItemFSHasCustomIcon         = 0
kMDItemFSInvisible             = 0
kMDItemFSIsExtensionHidden     = 0
kMDItemFSIsStationery          = 0
kMDItemFSLabel                 = 0
kMDItemFSName                  = "practicalinstruc00flin.pdf"
kMDItemFSNodeCount             = 0
kMDItemFSOwnerGroupID          = 20
kMDItemFSOwnerUserID           = 501
kMDItemFSSize                  = 12668272
kMDItemFSTypeCode              = ""
kMDItemKeywords                = (
    "http://archive.org/details/practicalinstruc00flin"
)
kMDItemKind                    = "PDF"
kMDItemLastUsedDate            = 2013-10-30 20:00:54 -0700
kMDItemNumberOfPages           = 210
kMDItemPageHeight              = 532
kMDItemPageWidth               = 370
kMDItemSecurityMethod          = "None"
kMDItemTitle                   = "Practical instruction in hypnotism and suggestion"
kMDItemUsedDates               = (
    "2013-10-16 00:00:00 -0700",
    "2013-10-17 00:00:00 -0700",
    "2013-10-30 00:00:00 -0700"
)
kMDItemVersion                 = "1.5"

In the OSX/Unix code, grep is being used to return the lines containing the height and width; awk is further formatting and outputting the lines of that output. All this could be done in AppleScript or AutoIt -- you don't really need grep and awk to do that. You just need to use AutoIt's string functions, like http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/docs/functions/StringSplit.htm

So, how to return the initial metadata? Maybe this would work (there may be others, but I'm needing to rush right now): http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-server/

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions