Recently I was using Julia to run ffprobe to get the length of a video file. The trouble was the ffprobe was dumping its output to stderr and I wanted to take that output and run it through grep. From a bash shell one would typically run:

ffprobe somefile.mkv 2>&1 |grep Duration

This would result in an output like

 Duration: 00:04:44.94, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 128 kb/s

This works because we used 2>&1 to redirect stderr to stdout which would in be piped to grep.

If you were try to run this in Julia

julia> run(`ffprobe somefile.mkv 2>&1 |grep Duration`)

you will get errors. Julia does not like pipes | inside the backticks command (for very sensible reasons). Instead you should be using Julia’s pipeline command. Also the redirection 2>&1 will not work. So instead, the best thing to use is and instance of Pipe. This was not in the manual. I stumbled upon it in an issue discussion on GitHub. So a good why to do what I am after is to run.

julia> p=Pipe()
Pipe(uninit => uninit, 0 bytes waiting)
 
julia> run(pipeline(`ffprobe -i  somefile.mkv`,stderr=p))

This would create a pipe object p that is then used to capture stderr after the execution of the command. Next we need to close the input end of the pipe.

julia> close(p.in)

Finally we can use the pipe with grep to filter the output.

julia> readstring(pipeline(p,`grep Duration`))
"  Duration: 00:04:44.94, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 128 kb/s\n"

We can then do a little regex magic to get the duration we are after.

julia> matchall(r"(\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}.\d{2})",ans)[1]
"00:04:44.94"