Get output from standard output when running DROID in profile mode

[Jerry Kuang]

Hi Brian,

When using DROID in profile mode via command line control, it would be great if the profiles are appearing up from the standard output and if the output is controllable. This is a good function to droid tool when it is used in command line control.

(1) Allow to get the profiles from standard output, just like what DROID non-profile does now.

(2) Allow user to select what columns can be output. This can be controlled by a parameter, like -f is used for filtering profile. For example, if I just want Name and MIME_TYPE, I can apply "-s <field>", so it is "-s NAME MIME_TYPE". Only the column of file name and column of MIME_TYPE will be in standard output.

May you guys please consider this requirement?

Thank you,

Jerry

[Brian O'Reilly]

Hi Jerry,
Thanks for your post.  The enhancements you suggest would involve some quite major changes to DROID, The internals of the profile and no profile modes work quite differently, with the former (in both GUI and command line use) making use of an Apache Derby database to store results during profile operation - and making use of binary files with the .droid extension which can only readily be understood by DROID itself. However I will  bear in mind your suggestions when considering future developments.
In terms of filtering output for specific columns, you may be able to get some of what you are aiming towards by:
 - running a profile from the GUI or command line, and saving this to a file (.droid extension)
 - creating an export file from the profile - you can save this to a file (the .csv extension is usual given the format, but not mandatory).
 - use the grep command (Unix) or Powershell (Windows) to process the file to select the required columns.
Clearly this is going to require some knowledge of grep and/or Powershell commands - but may be worthwhile looking at if you are likely to be regularly processing large numbers of files in this way.  You could even create batch or script files to run the profile, save an export, and process the results via standard output.  Admittedly all this is more complex than having the functionality readily available in DROID, but possibly it will be of some help.

Regards, Brian

[paul....@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk]

Hi Jerry,

I have raised this as an issue on the Droid github page, it will be assigned an appropriate priority but is unlikely to be included in the next release.  https://github.com/digital-preservation/droid/issues/101

Thanks,

Paul  

Paul Young

Digital Archivist

The National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 4DU