Request: Streamlining for CLI and GUI execution

[glocalglocal]

I am a newbie, and I am looking to streamline using the script with and without opening the terminal. Firstly, I am trying to execute:

$ ./shrinkpdf.sh -g "file name with spaces.pdf"

and get the output in a PDF file with a similar name (eg "file name with spaces_compressed.pdf", "file name with spaces_1.pdf" or something similar). As far as I can see, I have to specify an output filename every time.

This may already be possible, but if it isn't, is there a way to update the script to facilitate it?

Then, it would be good if we could right-click on a file (in my case in Dolphin in Debian 13 with KDE Plasma) and select 'Open with' the script. There must be a way to do this and it would improve efficiency dramatically.

[aklomp]

Hi, not quite sure what you mean with your first suggestion. Are you suggesting that the script should automatically generate an output file along the pattern of <input_file_name>_compressed.pdf? If so, that seems a bit opinionated, and the kind of thing that could better be handled by a wrapper script. The default behavior of writing to standard output seems reasonable to me.

I'm not aware of how right-clicking works with command line scripts in Linux desktop environments, but supporting that kind of platform-specific action seems out of scope for a generic command line script. Here too, I'd say that a wrapper script that handles the interaction and then calls shrinkpdf.sh to do the work would seem like the way to go.

[glocalglocal]

Most inexperienced users are unlikely to write their own wrapper script. I think shrinkpdf could easily take a suffix parameter, say, that 'compressed' you mentioned, instead of expecting the user to specify an output filename every time or write a script. Personally, I modified the script to add a `_` before `.pdf`. Now I select a PDF in my file manager (Dolphin), use 'Open with...' to send the file to the script, and get `filename_.pdf`. I also created a version of the script to force greyscale. That produces `filename_g.pdf`. All this works great and it's super-efficient. I think the original script could make it easier for new users like me to achieve a similar workflow. Thanks for the script btw. With the above adaptation it saves me a lot of time. EDIT for formatting. Also, now that I am in front of a proper computer, in case it helps anyone, I should clarify that my modification above is simply replacing `ofile="-"` in the original script with: `filename="$1" ofile="${filename%.*}_.pdf"` I think `-o filename.pdf` could be enhanced to accept something like `-o *_suffix.pdf`, where `*` is the infile.