Calibredb export: can I do a subset of books (based on a query)?

[spedinfargo]

I see in the calibredb page there is a way to either export all of the books or a single ID:

calibredb export [options] ids

Does anyone have an example of how to export just a subset of books based on a search? For instance, I want to only export the Recipe books (author = 'calibre'). I'm assuming I would have to do a two step process and come up with a list of ids that match my query and then call 'calibredb export' one by one on those ids.

Any thoughts on the easiest way to do this?

Thanks.

[eschwartz]

You use

calibredb list -s "search-term" -f ""

and pipe | the output through a filter to remove the first line, ("id") then pipe the resulting list of ids to

calibredb export [options]

In bash that would be

calibredb list -s "search-term" -f "" | tail -n +2 | calibredb export [options]

tail is a linux command to output only the last x lines (or start from line number +2) but I'm not sure how to do the equivalent on Windows, if you are using Windows.

[spedinfargo]

That sounds about what I thought would be needed. Should be able to pound out a powershell script to do similar...

Thanks for the response...

[spedinfargo]

Hi eschwartz,

Quick question: when I do a -f with an empty string (-f "") I get an error on Windows that says a blank string is not acceptable. Do you get the same error on unix?

I can probably work around it and just use "uuid" and parse each line somehow to get the ID... but it would be much nicer if I could just get a list of IDs with the command...

[eschwartz]

No I get a list of ids, one per line. calibredb list always gives you the ids field, plus the -f "fields".

  -f FIELDS, --fields=FIELDS
                        The fields to display when listing books in the
                        database. Should be a comma separated list of fields.
                        Available fields: *annotations,*asin,*file,*filesave,*
                        subseries,*subseries_index,*titlesave,author_sort,auth
                        ors,comments,cover,formats,identifiers,isbn,last_modif
                        ied,pubdate,publisher,rating,series,series_index,size,
                        tags,timestamp,title,uuid
                        Default: title,authors. The special field "all" can be
                        used to select all fields. Only has effect in the text
                        output format.

and ids isn't on the list of available fields.

So passing the empty string I used to clear the default fields, but I have no idea why it's erroring for you.

....

Found it! It's a Windows problem, not calibre. Apparently powershell doesn't like empty strings, see here for how to deal with it: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...ing-powershell

[spedinfargo]

Wow, that's pretty hard-core on the powershell thing. I would have assumed it was a bug with calibredb on windows vs. linux. Nice find.

Putting the double quotes inside of single quotes (or single ticks as someone used to call them) worked fine: '""'

Good find!

[eschwartz]

I just googled "windows pass the empty string as parameter" but I'll take the compliment anyway.