is there an equivalent to applescript for linux?

[demiurgen]

this may not be the right place to post this. if so i apologies.

is there an equivalent to applescript for linux?
or a program that can automate repetitive tasks?

i have almost 3000 folders (ca 4Gb each) that i want to compress with rar (it more than halves them).

on a mac this is a breeze with applescript, but is there something similar for linux or maybe a program that can do stuff like this??

[PaulFr]

How are your 3000 folders organized ? I assume:

1. There is a single folder, and inside this folder, you have 3000 sub-folders each containing other files / folders,
2. You want to compress these sub-folders into 3000 rar archives, and
3. Your 3000 sub-folders were in /home/dgen/movies and there are no folders other than these 3000 in /home/dgen/movies.

I would open a terminal and run the command
cd /home/dgen/movies; find * -maxdepth 0 -type d -exec rar a {}.rar {} \;
The find * -maxdepth 0 -type d finds exactly the sub-folders of the current folder (and ignores any sub-folders of these folders).

For each such folder found, it executes the command rar a <directory_name>.rar <directory_name> where <directory_name> is expressed in the find command as {}.

If you want to remove the files and sub-folders of each of the 3000 folders as you create the corresponding rar archive, you can change the command to
cd /home/dgen/movies; find * -maxdepth 0 -type d -exec rar a -df {}.rar {} \;

This is just one way to do this - you could use scripting languages like Perl / Python to do this as well. Hope this helps.

[mridkash]

I don't know abt applescript but bash scripting is very powerful tool for performing repititive tasks.

Here is a site to get you started;

http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/part1.html