Automated document scanning script

This article is taken from http://www.thelinuxblog.com/automated-scanning-with-the-shell/ as I need to scan several hundred photographs very soon. Thanks to Owen for correcting my link, I had linked to the wrong page.

I recently needed to scan a lot of images on my desktop PC. Unfortunately I am not the owner of an automatic document feed printer, and if I were it wouldn’t have helped this time because the documents I needed to scan were not feed able. XSANE is a great way to scan documents visually in Linux. Its not the easiest to use, but it has plenty of options. Part of the SANE package is scanimage, scanimage can be used from the shell.

The first thing that I did was a few test images with scanimage. I quickly found out that scanimage outputs in pnm format, and at a high resolution if the correct options are used. Once I found out the good options for my scanner (scanimage –resolution 400 > file.pnm) I wrote a quick shell script to scan up to 1000 times or until I don’t give the script any input. To do this, I used a combination of snippets that can be found in this blog column.

Here is a direct link to the script, and the shell script source below

#!/bin/bash
for i in `seq 1 1000`; do

#get input line
read inputline;

if [ $inputline ]; then

#Process Scanned Image in BG
echo Scanning Pg$i;
scanimage –resolution 400 > Pg$i.pnm;
echo Next;
else
exit
fi

done;

To use it all I do is execute the script, and I get to scan up to 1000 documents providing I type something after it prompts “Next”, and then hit enter. Once I was done scanning, I just hit enter to stop the script execution and then moved on to manipulating the images with the shell.

Hope this shell script scanning script is useful, if it is then drop me a comment, or if you have any suggestions or it was not at all helpful still drop me a comment.