DIY Kobo annotation backup
13 points by kghose
13 points by kghose
This is nowhere near as cool as some of the work I see here, but I did have a hard time finding a solution to this problem (exporting library book annotations from a Kobo) so I thought I'd write it up and post it, since lobste.rs probably has people who both read on eReaders and do bash scripting.
A more important discussion I'd benefit from is tangential - what do you all use for scripts of this length and scope?
I felt this script was just pushing the boundary of where I was comfortable using Bash. It has an SQL query and a few calls to ImageMagick, so it felt OK to use Bash as the glue, but I had an unresolved escaping issue that took me enough time to debug that I felt I might move to Python or perhaps Go.
would you ever use a shell with a “more sane” scripting language? e.g. fish? fish makes me a bit more confident and happy writing non trivial functions, because very few of the common cases require any arcane syntax.
Honestly, I broke out Perl a few months ago to solve my problem of "xmobar doesn't work on Alpine anymore"+"bash scripts getting too complex", and I've ported a few other bash scripts over to it. The other bonus of Perl is it's about as portable and written-about as C, so you get the immediate advantage of being able to throw it anywhere and have it work, along with the other advantage that every second-layer problem you want to solve has already been solved before.