I've had need to rip many audio tracks on my Linux box. I never remember the command (cdparanoia) or its syntax. And running one command before typing in the next one seems silly - retyping "cdparanoia" each time is annoying, and allows the CD to spin down. Meanwhile, I don't really want the tracks to save as their track number, either, which would otherwise make shell scripting trivial: for x in 1 3 8 10; do cdparanoia $x $x.wav; done And, of course, tracks can have errors which could stream past the screen. So, perl to the rescue:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

my @results;

while (@ARGV)
{
    my $track = shift;
    my $name;

    if ($track =~ /^(\d+)[=:](.*)$/)
    {
        $track = $1;
        $name = $2;
    }

    while (@ARGV and $ARGV[0] !~ /^\d/)
    {
        $name .= shift;
    }

    $name .= ".wav";

    my @cmd = (qw(cdparanoia), $track, $name);
    print join(" ",@cmd),"\n";
    system(@cmd);
    push @results, sprintf "%-30s - %s (%d)\n", $name, ($? == 0 ? 'SUC
+CESS' : 'FAILURE'), $?;
}

print "\n\n";
print @results;
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(Saved as "ripcdaudio") Usage:

 $ ripcdaudio 1 song name 2 other song name 5 another song 8 lots of s
+ongs
[download]