Menu Bar Shell Commands

In order to provide some types of help, the Menu Bar Shell Commands are available for customization purposes (figure 18.1).

Figure 18.1: Some windows used to manipulate Shell Commands scripts

In the main window on the top line containing the File, Edit, ... Window pulldown menus, all the way to the right hand side is the shell cmds icon. You might see a small white-color bordered box with the "i" inside and if you mouse over it, the tooltip says shell cmds. This is a configurable popup which gives you the ability to see a table of Shortcuts in html format, refer to the reference manual or execute a pre-defined script to perform a specific task, such as some type of post processing which you plan on performing on a repeat basis. Unless redirected elsewhere, the output from executing any script-type commands will be displayed in the window from where you started CINELERRA-GG.

The Shell Cmds popup menu items are configured in:

Settings → Preferences → Interface → Shell Commands

This runs a dialog that lets you Add/Del/Edit the scripts in the main menu popup. Possible options are:

1. Add a new menu item/script:
   • click on the Add button
   • in the Label box, change the word new to the desired menu label (for example: Graphics Editor)
   • in the Commands box, type the command lines to be included in the script (for example: gimp)
   • click the green checkmark for OK in the Commands window
   • click the green checkmark for OK in the Shell window
   • click on OK or Apply in the Preferences window
2. Del to delete an existing menu item
   • select to highlight an entry in the CINELERRA-GG: Shell listbox
   • click on the Del button
   • click the green checkmark for OK in the Shell window
   • click on OK or Apply in the Preferences window (the entry is now deleted)
3. Edit an existing menu item:
   • select to highlight an entry in the CINELERRA-GG: Shell listbox
   • click on the Edit button (the Commands window appears)
   • set the label and/or commands to the new desired values
   • click on the green checkmark for OK in the Commands window
   • click on the green checkmark for OK in the Shell window
   • click on OK or Apply in the Preferences window

Next time you click on the shell cmds icon, you will have the changes you made in effect.

Both the Add and Edit options have checkboxes in the Commands window for the following:

• OnExit notify     choose Always, Never, or On error to get a popup window notify
• run path/script.sh + argvs     to run a particular script with argvs ($1, $2,... arguments)

When modifications to the Shell Cmds are included in a new CINELERRA-GG release, they are not added to your Preferences file automatically unless you create a new one. But if you have added no custom scripts, you can update your currently existing $HOME/.bcast5/ CINELERRA-GG_rc file to delete the lines that are all grouped together that begin with the letters: SHBTN (the entire line – these are the SHell BuTtoNs). You should first Quit out of CINELERRA-GG, edit the file, and then when you restart CINELERRA-GG, it will create the new default buttons in that same file.

There are 2 specific CINELERRA-GG file names that have unique characteristics that allow for usage from a user-defined script. The first one is an environment variable, CIN_RENDER which is used in the RenderMux shell command that is already setup. It contains the complete path and filename of the file in your session that you selected as Select a file to render to when you ran a Render operation.

The second one concerns usage of the Resource window assets to use as argvs in shell scripts. The added command line can ONLY be a script. Then if your script refers to $1, $2 and $3 and you highlight 3 files in the Media folder, their full path name will be used as the argvs to your script. For example, if you added a shell commands script /workspace/script.sh that contains the following lines:

cp “\$1” /tmp/temporary_copy
cp “\$2” /tmp/new_copy
cp “\$3” /tmp/file_to_upload

and you highlight 3 files in the Resources window called ABC.mp4, 123.mp4, and Final.mp4 and execute your added script from the Shell Cmds icon, you will be copying those 3 highlighted files to the new names on /tmp.

There are some Help features currently included in the Shell Cmds menu. Those available are:

1. Current Manual in PDF format from cinelerra-gg.org or automatically downloaded.
2. Setting Shell Commands how to which explains how to configure your own commands.
3. Shortcuts html file for easily looking up a particular shortcut.
4. RenderMux shell script to use ffmpeg concatenate to copy files such as look.mp4001, look.mp4002, look.mp4005... that were rendered using Create new file at each label or with the Render Farm.
5. Delete brender files in tmp shell script to delete the many brenderX files in /tmp when using the default location.