Path: ...!pothead.dont-email.me!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: pothead <pothead@snakebite.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Too many trolls -- starve 'em!
Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2025 23:56:11 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: Muffler Bearings LLC
Lines: 53
Message-ID: <10d19er$25mqf$1@pothead.dont-email.me>
References: <10d101j$22sgo$1@dont-email.me>
 <10d15mq$24o3e$1@pothead.dont-email.me> <10d17br$23uhu$1@dont-email.me>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Injection-Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2025 23:56:12 +0000 (UTC)
Injection-Info: pothead.dont-email.me; posting-host="37c977c92c1e4a93e2e6f48daf9532cc";
	logging-data="2284367"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org";	posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/V7S2uzahnCOxXzdIuKsrR"
User-Agent: slrn/1.0.3 (Linux)
Cancel-Lock: sha1:/5oABNefDqf26yOQaX+UkX2YdcM=
Mail-Copies-To: no-one

On 2025-10-18, vallor <vallor@vallor.earth> wrote:
> At Sat, 18 Oct 2025 22:52:10 -0000 (UTC), pothead
><pothead@snakebite.com> wrote:
>> I have a somewhat odd request. I have about 2TB of files that have
>> been compressed as RAR files. The majority of them have associated
>> PAR files as well. They are all in different directories under a
>> single top level directory called "compressed".
>>
>> So how can I run something like "QuickPar" under Linux to traverse
>> the directories and automatically repair what is broken? And once
>> that completes, how can I do the same with the RAR files to combine
>> them back into their original form which is mostly PDF and mp4? Using
>> a gui will not work due to the number of files, directories and
>> having to anwer the prompts?
>>
>> Any ideas?
>
> Without knowing how your tree is laid out, it's hard to knoNew Boiler Reccomendations w, but any solution
> will probably use either parchive (for legacy PAR) or par2 (for PAR 2.0), along
> with find and unrar.
>
> unrar is shareware, as is rar, so you have to register it after 40 days (or so
> says synaptic).
>
> The way I'd do it is come up with a script where you can cd into one of your archive directories, run parchive (or par2), then run unrar.  After you've satisfied youself that
> your script is working, you can use find . -type d to get a list of directories, possibly
> using -exec to run your script in each directory.  Note that your script will probably
> need to accept a directory name as an argument, so it can chdir there to work
> your par/unrar magic.
>
> (Of course, this assumes you have just one archive per directory.  If you have more
> than one, your find command will have to be that much smarter...)
>
> perl being my go-to language, I'd probably end up writing it in perl.  I don't expect
> others to know perl, though, because it's gone out of style...alas.  But if you're feeling
> adventurous, you can ask an LLM to write the script for you.  (This newsreader is
> written in tk/perl, and large chunks of it are output from ChatGPT5.)
>
> Or if you want to be more modern about it, you might want to try python -- but first,
> try a shell script.  It may be easier than you think.
>
Thank you for your wonderful suggestions.
I'm working on it as we speak.

TIA. 

-- 
pothead
"I have a lot of friends who are Democrats, and they’re idiots.
I always say they have big hearts and little brains.
Almost every single policy rolled out failed.”

-- Jamie Dimon CEO JPMorgan Chase.