Movie Selector

This is a console application written in C++ (initially in ISO C++17) which helps select a random movie to watch from the available ones in the given directories.

Basically, not just movies, it can be used to select anything from anywhere. One just needs to write a valid Regular Expression to match the desired files in the given directories, and then among the matched ones, this application provides a random file name.

How can one make it work?

One just needs to add the search path(s) as mentioned in the code (where we have the files to select from), and a Regular Expression to match desired file names (examples are mentioned as comments).

Then, one needs to compile the code. The most simple way to do so is:

mkdir --parents build/
g++ -std=c++17 -o build/movie movie.cpp

Running it is simple then:

./build/movie

You can use the compile options of your choice, just make sure you compile the source with C++17 (or higher) enabled (-std=c++17, -std=gnu++17 or higher), as this code makes use of the std::filesystem API which came out with the ISO C++17 standard.

Some History (in case you're interested)

A few years back (in 2017), I accumulated a lot of movies in my movie collection. It got bloated so much, that it was always hard for me to just pick one to watch! So, I wrote a very simple code in C++ (the source name was movie.cpp) back then, which just gave me a random movie name among the ones which existed in the given search paths. It did work out well enough for me, I never had any problems selecting stuff.

Some time back (in 2020), I accidentally removed this source (along with the executable), and sadly, I didn't have any backup for it! This is when I realized how heavily I relied on it! 😥️

So, I definitely wanted to write it back again, and in a better way, in terms of design and coding, as I believe I had a lot more knowledge compared to what I had at that time. Plus, this time C++ also had become a lot more advanced than what it used to be. So this is my new implementation, which, in a sense, is lot more generic and general purpose.

Though it is very general purpose, still the the only reason why I named it to movie.cpp, and the repository as movie-selector, is to pay my respects to the original source. 🙇🏻‍♂️️

And, by the way, this is how I compiled it for myself:

g++ -no-pie -fno-pie -fsanitize=address -fno-omit-frame-pointer -fno-common -pthread -Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic -O3 -ggdb3 -std=c++23 -o build/movie movie.cpp