This blog used to a be a single HTML page which was getting a bit large. I have converted it to a Gatsby (React) site based around markdown pages.

One task I wanted to automate was creating well-named markdown files for each blog post.

I wanted to be able to type in bash:

mknewmd "Book review Pro ASP.NET Core MVC 2 by Adam Freeman"

and to have a file named book-review-pro-aspnet-core-mvc-2-by-adam-freeman.md created for me, with the contents of a template empty.md for me to paste the content into. So, all lower case, spaces turned into hyphens and no special characters or dots.

I used two inline bash functions for this. First lowerdashed:

• turns the spaces into hyphens

• makes all alphabetic chars lower case like this:

  lowerdashed() {  hyphensInsteadOfSpaces=${1// /-}  ; lowerAndHyphenated=$(sed  's/[^a-zA-Z0-9-]//g' <<< "$hyphensInsteadOfSpaces" ) ; echo "$lowerAndHyphenated" ; }
  

  Then mknewmd:

• copies the template empty.md file into a new file with the appropriately cleaned file name (returned by lowerdashed) like this:

  mknewmd() { cleaned=$(lowerdashed "$1") ;  cp src/markdown-pages/empty.md "src/markdown-pages/$cleaned.md" ; }