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Auto Organize CCTV Recordings Using Bash

Auto Organize CCTV Recordings Using Bash

Varun Sridharan's photo
Varun Sridharan
·

6 min read

In my home i am running a NVR (Network Attached Video Recorder) which captures & stores all the CCTV recordings in my storage server. but the files that is created by the recorder is not well organized and it looks something like below

2020-11-27T16-01-40.mp4
2020-11-27T16-06-18.mp4
2020-11-27T16-10-29.mp4
2020-11-27T16-14-05.mp4
2020-11-27T16-15-04.mp4

you can see the above file name is a actually a Time Stamp and it can be easy to identify the file when we don't have large no of files.

It will become hard when we need to look for a specific recording for a date & time.

So i decided to write a script which can be automated using cron to organize the files.

How it should be organized ?

I wanted this to be quickly accessible at any cost and the folder structure that i choose is below and i am sure this is the most common structure too

/{year}/{month}/{date}-{short-day-name}/{hour}-{minutes}-{seconds}.mp4

Example : /2020/01/01-Wed/13-04-00.mp4

Why i chose BASH ?

Mainly because i don't have to install any additional software for it & i wanted to try BASH with a real-world issue

Let's Create The Script

for the purpose of this blog post my recording path will be /mnt/cctv/cam1/

Create a file named organizer.sh and #!/bin/bash in the first line.

First we need to find all the files & directory inside the recording folder for which we can use * at the end of the path which will provide the full list of files & directory inside cam1 folder and this should be used with for loop so that we can loop over all the file names.

for entry in /mnt/cctv/cam1/*; do
    echo "${entry}"
done

Since it lists everything inside a directory we need to make sure that we are looping just for the filenames. so its better to check if its a directory or not. using ! -d $entry will check if the given path is not a directory

if [ ! -d $entry ]; then 
    echo "${entry} is not a directory"
fi

when you run the above code it will provide the full path of a file instead of just the file name which will look like below.

/mnt/cctv/cam1/2020-11-27T16-01-40.mp4
/mnt/cctv/cam1/2020-11-27T16-06-18.mp4
/mnt/cctv/cam1/2020-11-27T16-10-29.mp4
/mnt/cctv/cam1/2020-11-27T16-14-05.mp4
/mnt/cctv/cam1/2020-11-27T16-15-04.mp4

so we need to extract the file name from the path string using basename function in bash

FILE_BASE_NAME="$(basename "$entry")"

which set the value of FILE_BASE_NAME as 2020-11-27T16-01-40.mp4 instead of the full path.

Next step is to extract time stamp & file extension which can be done by split the string into 2 using tr function.

FILE_DATE_TIME_RAW=($(echo "$FILE_BASE_NAME" | tr "." "\n"))

Using $FILE_DATE_TIME_RAW[0] will provide the timestamp 2020-11-27T16-01-40

Using $FILE_DATE_TIME_RAW[1] will provide the file extension mp4

Next step is to split the timestamp into 2 since we just need to extract the date,month & year

FILE_DATE_TIME=($(echo ${FILE_DATE_TIME_RAW[0]} | tr "T" "\n"))

Using $FILE_DATE_TIME[0] will provide the date stamp 2020-11-27

Using $FILE_DATE_TIME[1] will provide the time stamp 16-01-40

Next step is the convert the date stamp string into machine readable string so that we can extract date,month & year

Since my storage server runs on FREEBSD i will be using 

CUSTOM_FORMAT=$(echo $(date -jf "%Y-%m-%d" "${FILE_DATE}" +"%Y/%b/%d-%a" ))

if you are running on debian then the below code will work

CUSTOM_FORMAT=$(echo $(date +"%Y/%b/%d-%a" -d "${FILE_DATE} ${FILE_TIME}"))

I am not sure why the debian code did not work for me in freebsd i am new to bash and learning every day!

The final step is to make sure the output folder is created for which we need to use mkdir and then copy the file to new folder

FULL_SAVE_PATH="/mnt/cctv-output/cam1/${CUSTOM_FORMAT}/${FILE_DATE_TIME[1]}.${FILE_EXT}"
mkdir -p "/mnt/cctv-output/cam1/${CUSTOM_FORMAT}/"
mv "$entry" "$FULL_SAVE_PATH"

And here is the full script 

#!/bin/bash

SAVE_TO_PATH="/mnt/cctv-output/cam1/"
DIR_TO_USE="/mnt/cctv/cam1/"

for entry in "${DIR_TO_USE}"/*; do
    if [ ! -d $entry ]; then 
        FILE_BASE_NAME="$(basename "$entry")"
        FILE_DATE_TIME_RAW=($(echo "$FILE_BASE_NAME" | tr "." "\n"))
        FILE_DATE_TIME=($(echo ${FILE_DATE_TIME_RAW[0]} | tr "T" "\n"))
        FILE_EXT="${FILE_DATE_TIME_RAW[1]}"
        FILE_TIME=$(echo "${FILE_DATE_TIME[1]}" | tr "-" ":" )
        FILE_DATE="${FILE_DATE_TIME[0]}"

        #CUSTOM_FORMAT=$(echo $(date +"%Y/%b/%d-%a" -d "${FILE_DATE} ${FILE_TIME}")) -- Worked In Ubuntu
        CUSTOM_FORMAT=$(echo $(date -jf "%Y-%m-%d" "${FILE_DATE}" +"%Y/%b/%d-%a" ))
        FULL_SAVE_PATH="${SAVE_TO_PATH}/${CUSTOM_FORMAT}/${FILE_DATE_TIME[1]}.${FILE_EXT}"

        echo "Local File : ${entry} => ${FULL_SAVE_PATH}"
        mkdir -p "${SAVE_TO_PATH}/${CUSTOM_FORMAT}/"
        mv "$entry" "$FULL_SAVE_PATH"
    fi
done

Thats it the script is done when you run it will auto organize the files 

/mnt/cctv-output/cam1/2020/11/27-Fri/16-01-40.mp4
/mnt/cctv-output/cam1/2020/11/27-Fri/16-06-18.mp4
/mnt/cctv-output/cam1/2020/11/27-Fri/16-10-29.mp4
/mnt/cctv-output/cam1/2020/11/27-Fri/16-14-05.mp4
/mnt/cctv-output/cam1/2020/11/27-Fri/16-15-04.mp4
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