A quick tag editor for my website

Yeah, I keep adding new scripts to make my blogging life easier. In this case, to help me edit tags with less hassle.

I have a bit of a love hate relationship with bash scripting. Because you get to have access to all kinds of small tools, piping and doing unixy things, at the cost of having horrible syntax and being kinda hard to read sometimes.

Anyways, a couple posts ago I shared how to sort tags in different ways, the truth is I’ve been meaning to do some cleaning up, inspired by Adam’s post.

He used the usual commands such as sed and grep, and I decided to quickly write a script to edit the desired tags for any file in a similar manner.

#!/usr/bin/bash
#
file=$1
oldtags=$(cat $1 | grep "tags:" | head -1 | awk '{for (i=2; i<NF; i++) printf $i " "; print $NF}')

echo $oldtags > /tmp/tagedit
vim /tmp/tagedit

newtags=$(cat /tmp/tagedit)

rm -fv /tmp/tagedit

sed -i "s/$oldtags/$newtags/g" "$file"

This code is rather simple, it takes the path of a file, which is given as an argument, running something like

./edit-tags.sh filename

That filename is parsed, using grep, head and awk. a new temporary file containing all existing tags of that file gets opened with vim, containing the existing tags. From there I can add or remove tags as I please, and once saved, I replace the original file accordingly.

It is rather simple, and I think it could be done better. So please, I beg you to give me any suggestions to improve it. I tried my best to understand stuff like getopts and the like, to have arguments and flags but I just didn’t really get it.

Regardless, this is day 5 of my second attempt at #100DaysToOffload

https://fosstodon.org/@joel/109637626137604618

More on this site

Done exploring? Why not more? Here's some more great content only for those who reach the bottom of this page. Suit yourself!