[Linux] Bash Adventure: Automatically write the copied link to the text file

October 24, 2020 · #Linux #Bash

Many times we require to download bunch of things, be it videos, images, audio files or pdfs. For that batch download is the easiest way to avoid the painstaking process of downloading each file individually. For batch downloading, if we have a text file containing list of urls we can automate the downloading process by using command line tools such as curl, wget or powerful opensource softwares such as youtube-dl.

But, how can I create a text file of my desired download urls automatically? Well there is a one solution that I came across thanks to askubuntu post, that solves our problem.

Step-1: Create a folder and empty text file where urls will be written automatically.

mkdir AutoCopy && cd AutoCopy && touch links.txt

Make sure you have a copy of following shell script in your folder.

Open your favorite text editor copy following code and save that file as “automatic_transfer_copied_text.sh” in folder created in step-1.

#!/bin/bash

# name: automatic_transfer_copied_text
# author: Ghost Rider 
# source: Glutanimate and Siddharth (https://askubuntu.com/questions/1167026/detect-clipboard-copy-paste-event-and-modify-clipboard-contents)

# Automatically transfers text copied by the mouse to some text file

while ./clipnotify;
do
  SelectedText="$(xsel)"
  CopiedText="$(xsel -b)"
  if [[ $CopiedText == $SelectedText ]]; then
    echo $CopiedText >> "$HOME/AutoCopy/links.txt"
  fi
done

However, we have not made the shell script as executable. Make it executable using

chmod +x automatic_transfer_copied_text.sh

You can see now that the color of file automatic_transfer_copied_text.sh has turned green and can be executed like a binary executable. However,wait…! We need to sort out the dependancies.

There are two dependancies:

xsel which can be installed as:
```
 sudo apt-get install xsel
```
clipnotify

Clone the repo from: https://github.com/cdown/clipnotify in the directory of your choice.

Copy the two files clipnotify.c & Makefile from this folder to your directory where your automatic_transfer_copied_test.sh is available.

Now, you can sort out the option of creating shared library for this by compiling from source as
```
sudo apt install git build-essential libx11-dev libxtst-dev
git clone https://github.com/cdown/clipnotify.git
cd clipnotify
sudo make
```
Wierdly, I got a compilation error for “sudo make” line as “Command not found cc, make error 127”.

The problem was solved by simply modifying the final line as:
```
make CC=gcc
```

Now that, we have all our dependancies available. Run the shell script as follows:

./automatic_transfer_copied_text.sh

The script above will start a session of automatic writing onto the specified text file. Whatever link or text that you copy will be pasted automatically!!.

Let’s assume the urls you copied are some video files, then you can download all of them by using my personal favourite downloader (youtube-dl) as

youtube-dl -f best -a links.txt

Here, the -a flag is used to specify the file containing URLs to download. It considers ‘-‘ for stdin, one URL per line. Lines starting with ‘#’, ‘;’ or ‘]’ are ignored as comments. The -f flag is for video format selection which is set in above example to the best resolution available.

Enjoy the bash automation with a beaming face..!

This post couldn’t have been possible but the following two resources:

If you need to copy from the PDF without linebreak and paste elsewhere, you may visit

Scripts/PDF-Copy-without-Linebreaks-Linux at master · SidMan2001/Scripts · GitHub