Shell short - tagging old posts in Nikola

Sun, 15 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Quick post to add to the recent command line fu I've been writing about.

Douglas Peterson had another Whatever happened to post. This time on Logo. I wanted to reply, talk about NetLogo and link to some of my old NetLogo posts to help show how cool it is.

Nikola supports tags, makes a nice tags page and for each tag, a nice page of all the links.

Nikola has a plugin tags which lets you manage tags from the command line. For instance:

nikola tags -a netlogo posts/somepost.org

Would add the tag netlogo to the specified post.

The problem: The tags plugin only works if the post has a tag: line already present in it's header comment and I hadn't put them in my older posts.

I had a bunch of posts, all of them in one directory. All the new ones were .org files and had the tag slug. The others were .md markdown files and .html html files.

Here's what a typical top block looks like:

<!--
title: "Looking for interesting questions"
date: 2010-01-03
-->

Sed to the rescue. Here's the what I ended up typing (from within the posts directory) to add the tags slug to the top comments right above the .. type: text: line:

ls *md *html | while read filename
do
sed "/type: text/ i .. tags: " $filename
done

A line at a time:

ls md html

This lists all the files with that end in md or html

| while read filename

The vertical bar (pipe) sends the output of ls into the while read command. The while command sets up a loop which, each time through, reads the next input and places into the variable filename. The body of the loop is between the do and the done.

sed "/ type: text/ i .. tags: " $filename

Sed is the stream editor. The stuff between the slashes finds the line with the text type: text in it. The i inserts a line above and the rest of the stuff in the quotes is what to insert. The $filename expands to each filename, one each time through the loop.

Now all of my files have blank tag slugs so I can find my netlogo posts and tag them:

nikola tags -a netlogo `grep -i -l netlogo posts/*`

Any command in backticks expands to the result of the commmand. The grep command has two argiments: -i means ignore case so it will find netlogo, NetLogo, NETLOGO, etc.. The -l tells grep to just output the filenames. So, the grep command will expand to a list of files that mention netlogo. The full command adds the netlogo tag to all of them.

So, just a bit of quick shell scripting and I've:

modified all old posts to accept tags.
added the netlogo tag to all my netlogo posts.

You can find all those posts here.

nikola on C'est la Z

Shell short - tagging old posts in Nikola

ls *md *html

| while read filename

sed "/ type: text/ i .. tags: " $filename

ls md html