Thanks so much for this script! I found out that it runs quite slow (1 bible / 30 min?) and my hard drive was grinding hard. So I tried running it from a RAM disk and it does a whole bible in a few seconds. Here's how (on Ubuntu 12.04):
cd /run
sudo mkdir bibles
cd bibles
sudo cp /path/to/bible.bblx .
sudo perl esbblx2mys.pl bible.bblx
Perhaps there is a way to code the converter so it doesn't depend on the hard drive performance....but not a big deal. Just thought I would share in case someone benefits.
Hi Dailyglen,
Thanks for the tip. Indeed, if you run the script to write on a physical disk, it is terribly slow. All my conversions happen on a RAM disk. I didn't mention it before because I don't know if it's possible to create a RAM disk on Windows and how that should be done. I made my instructions so that people on Windows can still utilize Strawberry Perl to do the conversion. For those with other distributions, you can always create a RAM disk yourself and do the conversion on that. To create a RAM disk, first become root (either with "sudo su -" and using your own password, or with "su -" and using the password for user root. Just create a directory and mount the RAM disk on it like this:
mkdir /ramdisk
mount -t tmpfs -o size=200M,mode=1777 tmpfs /ramdisk
This will create a RAM disk of 200MiB on /ramdisk. After this you can leave the root account and just use the space as any user (comparable to /tmp). If you want to permanently create such a RAM disk, don't execute the mount command above, but add the following line to /etc/fstab:
tmpfs /ramdisk tmpfs size=200M,mode=1777 0 0
and mount it with "mount -a". Doing it this way will verify that you didn't introduce a syntax error in /etc/fstab. Please note that all content on a RAM disk will disappear after a reboot or unmounting the RAM disk, even if you remount it.
For those of you who aren't using Linux yet (what's keeping you?) there seems to be RAM disk software that you can buy or you can watch with envy while we do it for free ;-)
Regarding the disk dependency, it will be hard to change that. I read the source bible in one go, but the writing of the destination bible goes verse by verse (it uses SQL INSERT statements, since the bible is a SQLite database). Maybe I can get a bit of improvement by using COPY instead of INSERT, but I doubt it will make that much of a difference. If I have some spare time I might experiment a little with that.
If there's anyone who wants to do this him/herself, by all means go ahead. I didn't include a license statement in the script but consider it BSD licensed (i.e. basically use it, modify it and distribute it however you want).
Regards,
Rob
