kcb

Python helper to execute bash scripts inside KDEConnect's sshfs mount. The main motivation behind this helper is to backup my smartphone's photos and Whatsapp folders with a single command and without resorting to a file manager. The approach however allows a whole range of possible use cases.

Installation and configuration

pip3 install --user kcb
mkdir ~/.config/kcb
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ReSqAr/kcb/master/Documentation/Examples/My%20Smartphone.sh -O ~/.config/kcb/"PHONENAME.sh"
chown u+x ~/.config/kcb/PHONENAME.sh
pico ~/.config/kcb/PHONENAME.sh

One has to repeat the last three lines such that in the end the local ~/.config/kcb/ folder contains bash scripts for all phones. Here PHONENAME is a placeholder for the KDEConnect phone name and phones without a corresponding bash script are ignored. These scripts can assume that they are run in the phone's sftp mount point, i.e. the folders DCIM, Downloads, Android, etc are actually directly visible. One should note that the connection can drop, hence the bash script must be sufficiently resilient to avoid tears.

Example bash scripts

The following is a sample bash script which backups the photo folder, OSMAnd's GPS tracks and the WhatsApp folder to the local ~/MySmartphone folder.

set -x

TARGET="~/MySmartphone"

echo "file listing"
ls

echo "GPS Tracks"
rsync --human-readable --progress --archive --ignore-existing --itemize-changes --prune-empty-dirs "Android/data/net.osmand.plus/files/tracks/rec/" "$TARGET/GPS Tracks/"

echo "WhatsApp"
rsync --human-readable --progress --archive --ignore-existing --itemize-changes --prune-empty-dirs "WhatsApp/" "$TARGET/WhatsApp/"

echo "Photos"
rsync --human-readable --progress --archive --ignore-existing --itemize-changes --prune-empty-dirs "DCIM/Camera/" "$TARGET/"

Usage

Since we installed the kcb executable in ~/.local/bin/, we start the application via ~/.local/bin/kcb. There are multiple ways around that, i.e. being able to just type kcb; one could add ~/.local/bin to the $PATH variable for example or - however use that at your own peril - by running the pip3 command as root.

Regarding the command line parameters of kcb, you can run kcb without any parameters in which case all bash scripts of all phones which are online are executed. Or you can list the names of the devices whose bash scripts should be executed.

Example usage

Assume that KDE Connect knows two smartphones named OnePlus and Samsung S8.

• kcb OnePlus executes just OnePlus.sh (if it exists)
• kcb "Samsung S8" executes just Samsung S8.sh (if it exists)
• kcb executes both shell scripts (if they exist)
• kcb OnePlus "Samsung S8" executes both shell scripts (if they exist)

License

Released under the GPL 3.

Contact

For bug reports please use the GitHub bug tracker. I would love to hear from you about your thoughts/use cases/etc, just drop me a line via yasin.zaehringer-kcb@yhjz.de.