Reading Metadata from Multiple File Parts

[notmetadataguru]

Hi,

I am wondering if exiftool has the capability of reading from multiple file parts. For example, I have a single large file that's split into multiple files. Could I supply exiftool with all of these file parts or is it only able to read from whole files? The reason I ask is because some of my files can be very large and it can take time to combine the individual files, so it would be great if I could shave off some processing time here.

BTW, love the forum and the app.

[Phil Harvey]

Without knowing what type of file we are talking about here, all I can say is: Yes

[StarGeek]

If the file is split at an arbitrary point, for example, a 2 gig video split in half with the linux split command, then I wouldn't think exiftool by itself could read it.  Though I would think maybe you could combine them with cat (?) and pipe the output through StdIn.

[Phil Harvey]

Thanks StarGeek.  I wasn't thinking about splitting with the "split" command.  I was thinking about dividing a multi-page TIFF into separate pages or something like that.

Yes, the "cat" command would work for "split" files:

cat FILE1 FILE2 FILE3 FILE4 ... | exiftool -

- Phil

[notmetadataguru]

Thanks Phil and StarGeek, this is exactly what we're doing but for very large video files, cat can be really slow. Thanks again for the replies.