SOLVED dmenu guru needed

Question

Edit: Darn it I think I should have posted this in the Program and Scripting section, sorry!
I am trying to use dmenu to help me choose from a bookmark file a website and then pass the chosen site on to firefox.
I am using sed but am a noob at it and have only gotten so far here is what I have with comments.
#!/bin/bash
SRC=~/.config/bookmarks
# The 'sed' command below converts the first space on each line of
# $SRC into a tab. Having changed $IFS, these tabs then serve as
# column separators in $ARR.
SAVEIFS=$IFS
IFS=$(echo -e "\n\t")
ARR=(`sed 's/ /\t/' $SRC`)
IFS=$SAVEIFS
#I need a command that hides the first column , containing the URLs, and passes only the names on to dmenu
(so that the list contains only their names(tags).
#Then when the name is chosen in dmenu to then pass the url not the name to firefox or luakit whatever
#the bookmarks file contents would be something like this
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php ArchWiki
bbs.archlinux.org arch-forum
translate.google.com google-translate
maps.google.com google-maps
images.google.com google-images
printfriendly.com printfriendly
Last edited by chickenPie4tea (2014-10-03 11:38:33)

Answer 1

I'm definitely not a guru (I'm sure there's improvements that can be made to the script), but here's a script I use to do something similar (in concept):
#!/bin/sh
# dedit: Use dmenu to open and edit a file from a given list.
# Global variables:
FILES=${1:-"$HOME/.config/dmenu/edit-list"}
if [ -f $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/dmenu/dmenurc ]; then
. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/dmenu/dmenurc
else
DMENU='dmenu -i -l 10'
fi
# Show list of options
choice=$(awk '{print $1}' $FILES | $DMENU -p "File to edit:")
if [[ $choice ]]; then
# use eval as get vim error if use awk's "system"
eval $(awk '/'$choice'/ && NF == 2 {printf("'$EDITOR' %s",$2); exit}
/'$choice'/ && NF == 3 {printf("%s %s",$3,$2); exit}' $FILES)
fi
You don't need to convert the spaces to tabs as awk uses space as a field separator (this can be changed).
Basically, you'd use awk (cut may also do the job here) column 2 to dmenu, and save the return value. If that is non-blank, you can use that in awk to find the correct line (see how to search specific fields in patterns in the manual) and pass the url (from column 1) to the application. specific fields can searched in the pattern section using:
The example above is a little more complicated than you need as it allows me to use two and three line entries (to change editor). You could remove the "NF == 3" entry and the NF references.
Finally, I don't use "&" as here as it wasn't needed (it's all in the same terminal), you might want/need to do that.
EDIT: cross posted with jasonwryan, not saying I think my method's preferable. Might update my script to remove the first awk call.
Last edited by skanky (2014-10-03 10:01:03)