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1

Using LaTeX creates a bunch of auxiliary files like foo.aux, foo.log, etc. Sometimes, I want to create a clean run of my document. I usually manually execute this in the terminal as

$ ls foo*
foo.tex
foo.aux
foo.log
foo.bbl
foo-blx.bib
$ rm foo{.aux,.log,.bbl,-blx.bib}

This works fine. However, it is error-prone and I don't want to accidentally erase my .tex file. So I added this function to my ~/.bashrc:

# Delete all non-TeX files
# invoke as: cleantex foo
# where: foo.tex, foo.aux, foo.log, etc. are files in directory
cleantex () {
    if [ -n "$1"]; then
        name = $(basename -s ".tex" "$1")
        rm -f $name{.!(*tex),-blx.bib}
    fi  
}

My question is about the key line

rm -f $name{.!(*tex),-blx.bib}

that actually executes the script.

Is this line well-written? What might I improve here?

share|improve this question
    
Which basename are you using? I am not familiar with (and can't find) the -s option for it. –  rolfl Mar 27 '14 at 23:22
    
I'm on Linux Mint 16 with GNU coreutils 8.20. My man basename has the option, as does the official documentation. Is your distribution out of date? –  WChargin Mar 27 '14 at 23:26
    
Essentially that fragment just trims the .tex suffix if there is one. So, cleantex foo is the same as cleantex foo.tex. –  WChargin Mar 27 '14 at 23:27
    
That option is not available on RHEL 6.4, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS ... which itself may be a problem. (I work in an 'enterprise'). Also, the basenames I have all will work that way without the -s option basename foo.tex .tex will produce foo. Food for thought –  rolfl Mar 27 '14 at 23:31

2 Answers 2

up vote 5 down vote

Mostly minor things:

  • [ -n "$1" ] is equivalent to [ "$1" ]. I'd go for the shorter one
  • Since you are in bash, you can use a variable substitution ${1%.tex} instead of basename, which is slightly better
  • There cannot be spaces around the = sign in assignments: name = val is incorrect, should be name=val
  • As @rolfl suggested in his answer, it would be better to check if a tex file exists before deleting anything

Putting it all together:

cleantex () {
    if [ "$1" ]; then
        name=${1%.tex}
        test -f $name.tex || return 1
        rm -f $name{.!(*tex),-blx.bib}
    fi  
}

Some extra remarks:

  • I would add the -v flag for the rm, so that it will print what it actually removed: rm -vf $name{.!(*tex),-blx.bib}
  • I guess you will never create .tex files with spaces in the name. If you ever do, you'll need to quote $name, for example: rm -f "$name"{.!(*tex),-blx.bib}
  • I would drop the -f flag from rm. Sure, there will be some error messages that way when there's nothing to delete, but I don't see that as a bad thing.
share|improve this answer
up vote 6 down vote

My real concerns with the script are:

  • cleantex path/to/file.tex will not delete files in that path, but in the current directory.
  • you should check the actual .tex file exists before you delete all the things around it.
  • the brace-expansion is unnecessarily complicated...... especially when combined with the extended glob !(*tex). I would manually resolve the brace-expansion so that there is only one complicated operation on that line.
  • I would use actual glob-expansion and only delete existing files.... and not use the -f option on rm (which does more than just suppress the error message if files do not exist....)
share|improve this answer

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