dNotes

Bash script that sends contents of one file annotated with tags, described in a json config file, to different files on your system.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• jq: a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor get it here.

Installing

Add jq to your PATH environment variable. Place the script inside a directory that is part of your PATH environment variable. Add executable permissions to the script:

chmod +x Your/Path/To/dNotes.sh

Running the script

Setup

Before running the script, you need to have a bucketfile that contains any text at all that you want to add to the end of different files. Next you surround the text that should go to a particular file with the <@TAG> INSERT TEXT <@/TAG> elements (these elements should be on separate lines). Meanwhile inside the config.json file you have a json array that consists of objects with a Tag and Path property (take care of escaping characters such as backslashes, since it has to be valid JSON!):

[
  {
    "Tag": "YourTag",
    "Path": "Path\\To\\Your\\File"
  }
]

You can create new tags by adding them to the config.json file, or by writing down the filepath after the opening tag, on a newline like so:

<@YourNewTag>
Your\Path\For\Your\New\Tag
...
</@YourNewTag>

Commands

Now you should be able to run the script by typing the following command in your favourite shell:

dNotes man

This will print some instructions (WIP).

dNotes -c "dNotes.config.json" "bucketFile.md"

Empties the bucketFile.md into the files described by the tags inside the config.json file.

Syntax

-p
	preserves the bucketFile instead of removing its contents
-c FILE
	filepath to the tag configuration file (has to be JSON)

Bugs

• Opening tags are currently case sensitive.
• Ending tag does not need to match, which could give issues if you're using </@> in your content somehow.

Towards the future

• Allow a default file to be set for the config.json file through an environment variable
• Implement the man function
• Option to clean config.json files by removing unused tags
• Nested tags that allow content to be directed to particular locations inside a file instead of only appending to the end (this will require line numbers, or a sort of (unique) pattern to be specified to direct the insertion of text)
• Complete rewrite of the script to be more efficient
  • Replace sed's with parameter expansion where possible
  • Remove inefficient bash loops
  • ...

License

This project is licensed under the GNU GPLv3 license.