[Flac-dev] flac command line usage (was: the road to 1.0...)

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 12:28:40PM -0700, Josh Coalson wrote:

> OK, I kind of like Matt's usage idea best.  I think there are only
> two minor downsides:
> 
> 1. You won't be able to do basename renaming within the command
> anymore, i.e. 'flac 01.wav songname.flac', you have to do a
> 'flac 01.wav && mv 01.flac songname.flac'

Or: flac 01.wav - > songname.flac

This modification would make flac behave more like gzip, which is a pretty good
model of how a unix-style compressor should behave.  The addition of a -c
option to force output to stdout, and a default input file of stdin would make
flac command-line compatible with gzip for basic compression and decompression
tasks.  Whether or not this is a good idea is another matter.

> 2. This one's way out there, but I guess if someone were on DOS then
> .flac will be too long and there's no way to get around that unless
> I add some option to specify a default extension.

Like gzip's -S option? ;-)  And/Or, the default extension could be different on
DOS than when a real filesystem is available, set at compile time.

> So unless there's a really big objection I think I'll go and make
> the changes so that the output file name is automatically determined and you
> can specify multiple input files.

Goodie.  Maybe the default decoding output filename should be set based on the
-f[urw] flags?  So if raw output is selected, the output file would not be
named .wav.  This is probably unnecessary, though; I imagine most batch
compressing/decompressing would be done with WAV.

-- 
 - mdz