Do You Have an Idea as to How to Implemen Multiselection for dbrowse about scripts

[amarakon]

Thanks, I will do that. I will reopen this issue if I have problems.

[bitsmanent]

That's because item1\nitem2 does not exists thus test -e "$newt" does not pass. You will need to loop between single items and handle them separately. For example:

for item in $sel; do
    Do something with $item...
done

You also need to take into account several things like:

• $target must updated only when a single directory is selected
• what if both a file and a directory are selected?
• what if two or more directories are selected?
• likely more check...

I cannot code that for you right now. Since this is not related to dbrowse but rather it's about shell scripting I'll closse this issue. Please ask for help on Stack Overflow or other related communities. Feel free to contact me on IRC if you wish, I'm on libera.chat as clamiax. Thanks!

[bitsmanent]

Unluckily this version has also several issues. I will push an update which should hopefully handle all corner cases.

[bitsmanent]

You cannot implement multi-selection. All you can do is to support dmenu variants which are patched with this feature. In addition you may write a note on the README to inform the users about that.

[amarakon]

I already applied the multiselection patch and it works for me. So if I do ls | dmenu I can select my Documents and Downloads directories and the output will be:

Documents
Downloads

But for some reason, it does not work with this script.
If I select two things, it will return me to the Dmenu prompt again.

[bitsmanent]

That's because sel is assumed to contain a single item. You will need to change the script by managing multiple items separated by a newline.

[amarakon]

Sorry I do not know how to prevent sel from assuming there is one item. Maybe it's here:

if [ ! -d "$target" ]; then
    echo "$target"
    exit 0
fi

But let's say I select two items, the output should be item1\nitem2. Why would echo have a hard time printing that?

[amarakon]

Thank you for the help. I will ask on unix.stackexchange.com or stackoverflow.com if I still have difficulties.

[amarakon]

Update: I managed to implement multi-selection support.

• $target must updated only when a single directory is selected
• what if both a file and a directory are selected?
• what if two or more directories are selected?
• likely more check...

• yep, the $target is only updated when a single directory is selected
• it will throw an error and exit the program, although I will probably create an error message to make it more user-friendly
• same as above
• it works exactly as expected, no issues

I did not need to add any for loops. I just had to modify the if statements and also add new ones. The only real difficulty I had is with the program option. In my dfm project, you can pass the --program option to open the file(s) in the default program for the file type. For example, if you select a .mkv file, it will use your default media player. This uses xdg-open from the xdg-utils package. But xdg-open only accepts one argument, so it will not work if more than one file is selected. I had to work around this by creating a complicated command that allows xdg-open to open more than one file. See this post on Unix Stack Exchange.

---

Would you like me to submit a pull request to this repository? I see that multisel is in the TODO of the dbrowse script. It will add less than 10 single lines of code to the script.

[bitsmanent]

There is no place in dbrowse for complex shell hacks, to hardcode file handling (xdg suite, etc.) or depending on GTK applications like gtk-launch. These are all features for another tool.

I expect dbrowse to do one thing and do it well: read items from dmenu, resolve them to full paths and navigate to or print them.

For instance, this is how I expect multisel to be implemented:

$ ./dbrowse # I will go to /tmp/test then select two files: foo and bar
/tmp/test/foo
/tmp/test/bar

I will accept PRs if they respect the phylosophy behind dbrowse.

[amarakon]

Oh, xdg-utils and gtk-launch are not required for dbrowse. The reason they are dependencies for dfm is that dfm supports opening the files selected with the default program. So on dbrowse, the first code block will change to the second:

if [ -e "$newt" ]; then
    target="$newt"
    if [ ! -d "$target" ]; then
        echo "$target"
	exit 0
    fi
fi

if [ -e "$newt" -o $(echo "$sel" | wc -l) -gt 1 ]; then
    target="$newt"
    if [ ! -d "$target" ]; then
        echo "$target" | sed 's@^'"$PWD"/'@@' | sed 's@^@'"$PWD"/'@'
	exit 0
    else
        PWD="$target"
    fi
fi

If this change is acceptable to you, I will submit a PR. If not, that is fine. The sed command in this case is a bit gimmicky.

[bitsmanent]

You should not test -e $newt before know if it's a filename or a list of values separated by newline. Also the sed workaround to fix the target don't always works:

$ cd /tmp/test ; ./dbrowse /tmp # pick file `foo` and directory `bar`
/tmp/test//tmp/foo
/tmp/test/bar

A better approach would be:

• count the items
• if it's only 1 and it's a directory then update $target
• otherwise for each item print the full path, finally exit

That should be enough.

[amarakon]

Alright so this one should work without any issues:

if [ `ls | wc -l` -ge 1 ]; then
    target="$newt"
    if [ ! -d "$target" ]; then
        echo "$target" | head -1 && echo "$target" | tac | head -n -1 | tac | sed 's@^@'"$PWD"/'@'
	exit 0
    else
        PWD="$target"
    fi
fi

This is the final version I'm making. Tell me if it's okay and I'll submit a PR. Otherwise, I'll stop commenting.

[amarakon]

I checked your latest commits and your multi-selection support looks good. I will implement it to DFM if you do not mind.

[amarakon]

I checked your latest commits and your multi-selection support looks good. I will implement it to DFM if you do not mind.

But as for the $NEWLINE variable, does NEWLINE="\n" not work? It seems like a better way of writing it.

Edit: Nevermind I checked it and it NEWLINE="\n" does not work.

[bitsmanent]

@amarakon Feel free to use the code as you wish.