Legacy ImageMagick Discussions Archive

Hi,

is there a mechanism to call convert with a very long commandline? Something like
and args.txt contains the commandline-arguments?

Bernhard

The ImageMagick command line does not directly support an indirect command line reference but some options do and you can wildcard the image filenames. For example,

• convert '*.jpg' -draw @args.txt image.gif

I think you should be able to put all your command line arguments in a file and write a script that would read the file and put all the text into a string variable and then have the IM command reference the string variable,

convert $commandlineargs

or

convert infile $comandlineparameters outfile

The script does not help, since the bash resolves the variable-reference and you are still left with a commandline which could be just too long. In fact, my very long commandline is generated that way.

Is is possible that a future version of IM could support reading the commandline from a file? In fact, IM is more like a programming-language, so why shouldn't it read it's program from a file?

Bernhard

Note that ImageMagick can be called from a number of scripting languages right now: Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc. As you rightly point out, very long ImageMagick commands lines are very nearly as complicated as a program anyway. Instead of struggling with command shells, why not make the jump to a full-fledged programming language?

I have an image-processing system with 6700+ lines of bash-code. So the jump to a full-fledged programming language is not that easy. Anyhow, the current versions of bash _is_ a full-fledged programming language (well, almost).

There are certainly more important topics for IM to work on, but maybe you can put the issue on the long-run wish-list.

Thanks, Bernhard

We have this issue on our long term to-do list. It is not a high priority but it most likely will be implemented within the next few months.