Episode: 122
Title: HPR0122: Batch processing on Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0122/hpr0122.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 11:45:05

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Hey it's Steve Geek and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio. On
today's short episode I want to tell you about batch processing on Linux
using the at and batch commands. Now before we get into this to make sure you
have them if you run Debian Linux you already have them installed. If you run
another flavor of Linux you may want to check and make sure you have the
package at Alfred Pango at installed. Now that's processing. You might be
asking yourself deep deep why do we want to do this? Didn't this go out in the
70s? Well yes and no it's certainly less prevalent as machines have gotten
faster but you often have lots of jobs that could benefit from being run
automatically. Such as converting videos from one format to another converting
waves to MP3s something like that. For the example I'll use I'll be
converting an MP3 to an odd with higher compression for the sake of a digital
music player. So how would this work? Well if you want to run jobs in succession
as compute as CPU processor time permits we use the batch command and it's very
easy to do. You kick off the next term you pipe in batch and hit enter and it'll
come up with a little mini shell where you can type in commands. So you get your
mini shell where you can pipe in a line and you type in like in my case for my
example I type an MP3 to odd space dash dash quality equal zero dash been rev
whatever that MP3 at hit enter you get the mini shell line again you control
D to get out of that and you can do that as many times as you want in succession
each time you do that it's going to say something like job so-and-so. Now it'll
begin running jobs in the background and as it runs the jobs it'll wait until
this 3 CPU time to pick off the next job and as it finishes each job it's
going to email you the results of your job. So in this case you'll see files
popping up in your directory with the new format and providing that you have
your internal email sub correct with it is to say that you're set up to read
emails sent from within your system as well as from the internet you'll see you
know one mail message waiting two mail messages waiting you know and then you
can go for your mail time read them and in the background very efficiently
you'll step through any number of files and convert them and it's a great
thing to do that's the operation of the command batch now the other
command which does almost the same thing is at and what add is for is taking
off a job at a specific time so you can instead of typing batch can type in
at space 1pm or at space 1300 or at midnight or at now plus one hour and then
the mini shell will come up again you'll type in your batch commands and at the
appointed time that will kick off and run the job and in this way you know you
can have a little computerized computer operator working free within your
computer I hope you've enjoyed today's episode of Hacker Public Radio
Hacker Public Radio is community radius so please consider recording your own
episodes have a lovely day
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