How to extract "metadata" from soundfont sf2 file using fluidsynth

This command will save the list of the instruments in a soundfont to a text file:
fluidsynth -i -f shell-commands.txt soundfont.sf2|grep ^000 > instruments.txt
fluidsynth -i -f shell-commands.txt soundfont.sf2 |grep "^[0-9]\{3\}" > instruments.txt

-i: start in non-interactive mode
-f: the file containing shell commands you want to send to fluidsynth
grep "^[0-9]\{3\}": only export the instruments lines of the output--lines beginning with 3 digits

The contents of shell-commands.txt:
inst 1
quit

The contents of instruments.txt will look something like this:
000-000 Kick
000-001 Snare
000-002 Hihat
000-003 Crash

If you only want the actual instrument name text and not the numeric prefix, use this:
fluidsynth -i -f shell-commands.txt soundfont.sf2|grep ^000|cut -c 9- > out.txt
fluidsynth -i -f shell-commands.txt soundfont.sf2|grep "^[0-9]\{3\}"|cut -c 9- > out.txt

cut -c 9-: remove the first 9 characters of each output line.

So the resulting contents of instruments.txt would look something like this:
Kick
Snare
Hihat
Crash


UPDATE 20130411: having "grep ^000" was a mistake because it was only outputting bank 0, whereas many soundfonts have more than 1 bank, so I changed the regex to grab any line beginning with 3 numbers: ^[0-9]{3}


Here's for-loop code to extract information from all sf2 files in a folder:
for f in *.[sS][fF]2; do echo "$f" >> out.txt;fluidsynth -a pulseaudio -i -f /path/to/shell-commands.txt "$f"|grep "^[0-9]\{3\}" >> instruments.txt; done


Thanks to this page for helping me figure out that I needed to escape the { and }, in the grep sentence, with a backslash:
http://www.robelle.com/smugbook/regexpr.html

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Here are the important steps and commands I use to generate data for my sf2 soundfont list (google docs spreadsheet):
1.
cd to the folder containing sf2 files

2.
for f in *.[sS][fF]2; do echo "$f" >> out.txt;fluidsynth -a pulseaudio -i -f /path/to/music/lmms/sf2/shell-commands.txt "$f"|grep "^[0-9]\{3\}" >> out.txt; done

3.
# formatting using regex
sed -r -i.bak s/\ +$//g out.txt
sed -r -i.bak s/^\([0-9]{3}\)\-\([0-9]{3}\)/\\1\\t\\2/g out.txt
sed -r -i.bak s/^\([0-9]{3}\\t[0-9]{3}\)\ /\\1\\t/g out.txt
sed -r -i.bak s/^\([0-9]{3}\\t[0-9]{3}\)/\\t\\1/g out.txt
sed -r -i.bak s/^\([^\\t]\)/\\n\\1/g out.txt

4.
Open out.txt in geany
regex search:
(\.[sS][fF]2).*$\n

regex replace:
\1

Now the first instrument line is on the same line as the soundfont filename.

5.
Copy the contents of out.txt and paste it into the spreadsheet.
Voila!