As part of the last post I initially used a bash script to generate the commands to output the individual videos. As per usual, when I finally got fed up of the limitations and syntax issues in bash I switched to a proper programming language, perl. However this time I learnt a neat trick to doing multi-line commands in bash with comments embedded using the array feature of bash. A multi-line command typically looks like:

However what if you want to add comments into the command? You can’t.

To solve this create an array:

and then use the following magic to execute it:

Using this you can also conditionally add in extra statements if you’re using a pipeline-type program such as imagemagick (convert) or melt: