bibutils

A collection of small, single-purpose scripts written in POSIX shell and awk for the manipulation of bibtex database files from the command line. Each one is small and single purpose. They are as follows:

bib-util

A general wrapper script that centralizes the functionality of many of the smaller provided scripts for convenience's sake.

bib-add

A script for inserting a new entry into a bibtex database file. It will accept a fully formatted entry on standard input and add it to a database file presented as an argument. The database is never modified in place: the new version is built in a temporary file, verified, and only then swapped in, with the previous contents saved in db.bib.bak. Replacing an entry (-f) preserves every other byte of the file.

bib-gen

A script which generates a bibtex entry based on input. By default it will run in an interactive mode, prompting the user to enter the relevant details. Additionally, it can be configured to read the data directly from stdin based on format arguments, or data can be provided directly as arguments. The formatted bibtex entry will be emitted on stdout.

bib-extract

A script which filters a bibtex database provided on stdin or as an argument and emits only those entries contained within a specified aux file. Both classic bibtex and biblatex/biber aux files are understood, and \nocite{*} selects the whole database. (roff citation sources are planned but not yet supported.)

bib-ls

List the entries in a database, one key per line, or with -l as tab-separated key, type, author, year and title.

bib-check

Lint a database: reports missing required fields, duplicate keys, duplicate titles (likely duplicated entries) and empty field values. Exits nonzero if any problem was found.

bib-key

A script which accepts a bibtex entry on stdin, and emits it on stdout with an automatically generated bibtex key.

bib-fetch

A script which accepts a pdf file as an input argument and will attempt to fetch a corresponding bibtex entry based on its DOI (via crossref.org) or, failing that, its arXiv id (via arxiv.org). An identifier can also be given directly with -d (DOI) or -a (arXiv id).

bib-convert

Convert between bibtex and refer database formats. The direction is detected automatically from the input, or can be forced with -b (to bibtex) or -r (to refer).

Canonical form

Entries that pass through these tools are canonicalized: lowercase entry types and field names, 2-space indentation, brace-delimited values with internal whitespace collapsed, bare numbers left bare, and macro references/concatenations preserved verbatim. @string and @preamble blocks pass through untouched.

Installation

make install            # PREFIX=/usr/local by default

Scripts go to $(PREFIX)/bin, the shared awk library to $(PREFIX)/share/bibutils, and man pages to $(PREFIX)/share/man/man1.

The scripts look for the shared awk library in $BIBUTILS_LIB, then in lib/ next to the script, then in /usr/local/share/bibutils. If installing with a non-default PREFIX, set BIBUTILS_LIB accordingly.

Dependencies

POSIX shell and awk only, with two exceptions: bib-fetch requires curl, plus pdftotext (poppler) for DOI extraction from pdfs.

Tests

make test               # unit + integration suites
make fuzz               # robustness fuzzing against bogus input