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1

In the terminal, I want to use ffmpeg2theora to convert all the .MOV files in a certain directory to .ogv files. However, the following does not work:

ffmpeg2theora *.MOV

Is there a good way to repeat a command multiple times on different files?

Thanks!

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2 Answers

up vote 17 down vote accepted

If you use the default shell (bash), you can use the following:

for file in *.MOV; do ffmpeg2theora "$file"; done
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This is more likely to work without the slashes: for file in *.[Mm][Oo][Vv]; do ffmpeg2theora "$file"; done – frabjous Aug 7 '11 at 15:17
yes, you are absolutely right, I corrected my answer. – Marcel Stimberg Aug 7 '11 at 15:24
1  
You could also set nocaseglob bash option to match lower-case, upper-case a mixed-case file extensions. – enzotib Aug 7 '11 at 17:29
Thank you! I've never used bash before but it looks really useful. (Time for me to go learn!) – Alan C Aug 8 '11 at 15:16
up vote 10 down vote

find . -iname '*.mov' -exec ffmpeg2theora '{}' \;

To limit recursion depth, you can add -maxdepth 1 before -exec

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Just to state the difference between this answer and my answer: Using find will also look for files in subdirectories, the for file in *.MOV solution will only look in the current directory. – Marcel Stimberg Aug 8 '11 at 17:24

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