Calibre command line syntax

[RobertWHayes]

I'm having trouble getting the options to work. I get "no such option" a lot.

What's wrong with this example?
c:\users\Robert>calibredb catalog Katalog.epub -generate-recently-added
Usage: calibredb.exe catalog /path/to/destination.(csv|epub|mobi|xml...) [options]

Export a catalog in format specified by path/to/destination extension.
Options control how entries are displayed in the generated catalog output.
Note that different catalog formats support different sets of options.


Whenever you pass arguments to calibredb.exe that have spaces in them, enclose the arguments in quotation marks. For example: "C:\some path with spaces"

calibredb.exe: error: no such option: -g

[theducks]

--generate-recently-added

    Include 'Recently Added' section in catalog. Default: 'False' Applies to: AZW3, EPUB, MOBI output formats

Note: 2@ -, not 1

[RobertWHayes]

Duh!
Thanks

[RobertWHayes]

New problem.
--genre-source-field="#genre" works, or --Preset works,
but not if I set the genre to #genre in the preset dropdown.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by RobertWHayes

Duh!
Thanks

That was IT?
The -g got me thinking that it was trying to parse and it failed

[RobertWHayes]

Yeh, I blame my aging eyes... and not being careful. The -- solved that whole mess.
Now it looks like I may not be able to use a --preset

[ShellShock]

Is double hyphen a Unix convention?

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by ShellShock

Is double hyphen a Unix convention?

Yes, its a bash thing, search for "double hyphen command" for why '--'

BR

[sjfan]

Originally Posted by ShellShock

Is double hyphen a Unix convention?

It's a GNU convention (and it precedes bash), and GNU's Not Unix, so it's not really Unix. But it's from the Unix-adjacent world.

Unix commands commonly had single-character flags: you might have "-h" for "help", "-l" for "list", -p for "print", and -e for "error". You can use multiple flags after a single dash, so "-lp" is the same as "-l -p".

GNU introduced long names—slower to type, but easier to remember. But when they did, there was a potential clash: is "-help" the same as "-h -e -l -p", or is it the single "help" option? To avoid this clash, they introduced the convention of using two dashes with a long option name. So "-help" remains "-h -e -l -p", while "--help" is the "help" long option.

This is why you get the original error message above: calibre says "error: no such option: -g" because it begins parsing "-generate-recently-added", sees a single dash, and interprets it as '-g -e -n -e -r -a....'.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/ta...l/ch10s05.html has some discussion.

[RobertWHayes]

Thanks, I a windows guy, but i do have a bin dir for fut/tut/sed...