Testing Renaming Script

Testing renaming script

Testing the basic bash script to pull the date from front matter header in the markdown file and move it to the _posts directory.

Bear is a Mac app, so some of the conventions, particularly around date are unique to macOS (or whatever it’s called now days). I am not a coder, so this is not as effecient as it could be and might contain some errors. I tried to check the most obvious points of failure. The destructive nature is ok by me because the original will be contained in Bear, and the exported file is transient.

My gut’s telling me to look at replacing cp with rsync. That’ll go on the [[Problems

list]] but can wait.

Update Mar 23, 2025: added --front-matter="process" to the yq because that’s what we’re actually processing, and it eliminates a bad mapping error. But looking at the documentation, the proper option is “extract” not “process.” We aren’t changing the file, only interested in extracting the value.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Argument validation check
if [ "$#" -ne 1 ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 <file>\n"
	echo "Reads the front matter date from the header, renames the file to jekyll's naming scheme."
    exit 1
fi

# Contants for where is all of this happening?
# _base directory of the site, directory where the original md and renames files go
_base="/path/to/the/parent/directory"
_rawdir="$_base/_raw"
_postsdir="$_base/_posts"

# Rename the input to a working name
rawfile="$1"

# Check that the file exists
if [ ! -f "$_rawdir/$rawfile" ]; then
    echo "File not found!"
	exit 1
fi

# Grab the post's date from the front matter YAML
# YQ is a command line YAML interpretter. It throws a warning on Bear files because they aren't 100% YAML
postdate=$(/opt/homebrew/bin/yq --front-matter="extract" ".date" "$rawfile")

# Check a date was found, otherwise error out
if [ -n "$postdate" ]; then
	jekylldate=`/bin/date -jf "%b %d, %Y" "$postdate" +"%Y-%m-%d"`
else
	echo "No date found in header."
	exit 1
fi

# Replace empty spaces with "-" and lowercase the filename
# Not 100% necessary, but looking for consistency
no_space_lower=$(echo "$rawfile" | tr " " "-" | tr A-Z a-z)
newfile="$jekylldate-$no_space_lower"

# echo "mv $_rawdir/$rawfile $_postsdir/$newfile"

# Copy the file from the current directory to the posts directory
/bin/cp "$_rawdir/$rawfile" "$_postsdir/$newfile"

# Check the new file exists before deleting
if [ ! -f "$_postsdir/$newfile" ]; then
	echo "File did not copy!"
	exit 1	
fi

# Delete old version. The original one is still in Bear
if [ -w "$_rawdir/$rawfile" ]; then
	/bin/rm -f "$_rawdir/$rawfile"
	echo "$rawfile -> $newfile"
else
	echo "File removal failed!"
	exit 1
fi

#globalcowpie