How to play .mp3 songs randomly by searching for them recursively in a directory and its sub directories?

Question

Once I am in the directory containing .mp3 files, I can play songs randomly using

mpg123 -Z *.mp3

But if I want to recursively search a directory and its subfolders for .mp3 files and play them randomly, I tried following command, but it does not work.

mpg123 -Z <(find /media -name *.mp3)

(find /media -name *.mp3), when executed gives all .mp3 files present in /media and its sub directories.

How can I get this to work?

Answer 1

mpg123 -Z $(find -name "*.mp3")

The $(...) means execute the command and paste the output here.

Also, to bypass the command-line length limit laalto mentioned, try:

mpg123 -Z $(find -name "*.mp3" | sort --random-sort| head -n 100)

EDIT: Sorry, try:

find -name "*.mp3" | sort --random-sort| head -n 100|xargs -d '\n' mpg123

That should cope with the spaces correctly, presuming you don't have filenames with embedded newlines.

It will semi-randomly permute your list of MP3s, then pick the first 100 of the random list, then pass those to mpg123.